Locus, March 2013

by Locus Publications

  Miranda weaves the best kind of tight, gripping teen thriller here. Thick with emotion and memories of blood, with the kind of darkness that discovering what you’re capable of might leave behind. She also effortlessly draws a convincing prep school, and populates her world with characters that feel like people we recognize but without any of them veering into the stereotypical. Even the mean girls and jerkish jocks have tantalizing secrets and hidden depths as Miranda writes them. And Mallory is grappling with one of the oldest horrors there is: the horror of what she has done, and whether she can ever escape the truth of that. Readers will be unable to stop looking, to see if Mallory can survive this darkness or if she must live with it. If she lives at all. Horror readers in particular will be happy to discover Megan Miranda’s taut and twisty explorations of the dark lurking just beneath the everyday surface.

  –Gwenda Bond

  RICHARD A. LUPOFF

  The Complete John Thunstone, Manly Wade Wellman. (Haffner Press 978-1893887596, $40.00, 649pp, hc). 2012. [Order from Haffner Press; .]

  Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) was a longtime, prolific North Carolinian who devoted himself largely to ‘‘low’’ fantasies based on regional folklore and settings. The term low fantasy, by the way, is not of my creation. I’ve come across it in academic writings, where it refers to works set in the mundane world, in contrast to ‘‘high’’ fantasy set in imaginary realms. For examples, consider Thorne Smith ‘‘low’’ and J.R.R. Tolkien ‘‘high.’’

  I don’t know as much as I’d like to about Wellman’s personal data. I suspect that he was descended from old Southern aristocracy, was very well educated, and never had to worry much about where his next paycheck was coming from. In a long career he strayed from the fantasy realm into science fiction, historicals, books for young adults, and nonfiction. His stories were a staple in the pulps, most particularly in Weird Tales, where he appeared on a regular basis for many years.

  In an introduction to this new collection, Ramsey Campbell reveals that the character of John Thunstone was created in a conference between Wellman and Weird Tales editor Dorothy McIlwraith, who had succeeded the legendary Farnsworth Wright upon Wright’s retirement. The first Thunstone story appeared in Weird Tales for November 1943, with 15 overall, the last of them in the issue dated May 1951. One more short story appeared in another magazine in 1982, followed by two Thunstone novels, in 1983 and 1985.

  Thunstone himself was a fairly standard pulp hero: tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular, with dark hair and neatly trimmed moustache. He lived in a series of comfortable hotel suites, usually in Manhattan, and dined and drank extremely well. I suspect that Wellman was something of a gourmet, for he describes many a breakfast and dinner in loving detail. And if the Thunstone stories are a reliable indicator, he was more than passingly fond of womankind.

  Wellman doesn’t provide many details of Thunstone’s background, although hints are dropped from time to time. For instance, we learn that Thunstone was a collegiate football player, that his nose was broken at least once and healed with a slight sidewise tilt, and that he performed military service, but in which war, branch of service, and campaign we are not told. He seems to have fallen seriously in love at least once. The object of his affection ran off and married a wealthy, elderly Count, who conveniently died, leaving her a well-to-do and beautiful widow who flits in and out of Thunstone’s life.

  One of the problems for creators of adventure heroes is, how does this person earn a living? Some of them, of course, are conveniently independently wealthy (Clark Savage, Curtis Newton, Kent Allard, and of course Bruce Wayne). Others have to work for a living. John Thunstone is a researcher, largely in the realm of supernatural themes in world folklore. He seems to receive extremely generous fees from scholarly journals and the sponsors of academic symposia. Hmm… might be nice to know his agent’s name.

  Throughout Thunstone’s career he faces two recurring foes. One is an evil sorcerer named Rowley Thorne. The other is actually a collective menace, the Shonokins. These are an almost-human species, distinguishable from homo sapiens by the fact that their ring fingers rather than their middle fingers are the longest, and by the fact that the pupils of their eyes are vertical rather than round.

  They’re a fascinating invention. They claim to have owned the Earth before humankind, and intend to retake possession in due course. They are all, apparently, adult males. They have no women or children, or so it appears. This leaves the reader wondering how they got here, and how long they’re going to be around since there is no way they can breed. I wish Wellman had told us more about these strange folk. I guess we’ll just have to devise our own explanations, or else allow the mystery to stand.

  Now this fellow Rowley Thorne. As described, he’s a very big man, as big as John Thunstone. He’s bald. He practices evil magic, and he bears a remarkable resemblance to Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) the self-proclaimed ‘‘wickedest man in the world’’ and alleged guru of L. Ron Hubbard. Largely forgotten today except for practicing occultists and historians of the peculiar, Crowley turns up in horror literature ranging from M.R. James to Somerset Maugham. You may rest assured that the similarity of names – Rowley and Crowley – is by no means coincidental.

  Thunstone claims no psychic or supernatural powers of his own, but he believes firmly in such things. He battles an array of sinister forces chiefly by using his knowledge of the occult. He also, fortunately, owns a sword cane which does possess magical abilities. It tingles when in contact with objects of black magic, it’s a nonpareil lock-pick, and it also serves on occasion as a perfectly splendid enemy-killer.

  All in all, Thunstone seems a fairly standard spook fighter. Think Carnaki, think Jules de Grandin, think Solange Fontaine, think Sax Rohmer’s Moris Klaw. What sets Thunstone apart is Wellman’s erudition and courtliness. There is something of the Wellmanesque Southern aristocrat in Thunstone, and in Wellman’s own formal, restrained prose. It takes a little getting into to get the feel of the Thunstone stories. But after the first few, they become addictive. They are formal yet terse. They were published in a pulp magazine but they do not read like pulp fiction. Don’t look for car chases, blazing gun battles, or lengthy flights of Lovecraftian tentacled descriptions. The only descriptions that Wellman seems to dote on are of food, liquor, tobacco, and beautiful women. The tobacco, politically incorrect in this enlightened 21st century, should really be forgiven in the works of a North Carolinian writing in the 1940s.

  The two Thunstone novels, What Dreams May Come and The School of Darkness, are obviously the product of Wellman’s final years. What Dreams borders on the English country house mystery, layered over with a marvelous bit of history, prehistory, and mystically induced time travel. The tale moves in a stately manner. One needs to shift gears from the compact narratives of the short stories to this leisurely, mannered storytelling, but again Wellman rewards the faithful reader with a fine, solid development and resolution. Darkness, as Ramsey Campbell suggests in his affectionate introduction, was one of Wellman’s final works. It has an academic setting and serves as both John Thunstone’s valedictory, and Manly Wade Wellman’s.

  While there have been earlier Thunstone collections, the Haffner edition is the first complete compendium of all the Thunstone short stories and the two novels. The book is handsomely illustrated with drawings by the late George Evans, reproduced from an earlier Wellman book. Splendid end papers and dust jacket painting by Raymond Swanland complete a beautifully packaged and produced volume.

  This book is one that belongs in the personal library of every lover of psychic detective tales, or of Southern regional prose, or of literate, sophisticated, modern fantasy fiction.

  –Richard A. Lupoff

  TIM PRATT

  Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, Jonathan Oliver, ed. (Solaris 978-1-78108-054-2, 278pp, tp) November 2012.

  Jonathan Oliver’s previous anthologies, End of the Line and House of Fear, demonstrated
a deft hand at selecting dark and horrific fiction from established voices and talented newcomers. Magic continues that trend, but demonstrates an even greater range of effects – there are scares here, certainly, but the most memorable stories don’t fit neatly into any category except ‘‘strange.’’

  Audrey Niffenegger, a talented and ambitious writer who seldom writes short fiction, begins the book in heartbreaking fashion with ‘‘The Wrong Fairy,’’ a historical fantasy of sorts about Charles Altamont Doyle, father of famous writer (and believer in fairies) Arthur Conan Doyle. The elder Doyle was a painter who suffered from depression and seizures, and finished his life in a series of mental institutions, though he never gave up painting. Niffenegger conjures a secret history of his illness and his art, with Charles Doyle visited by a representative of the Queen of fairies, who brings him a peculiar commission.

  Another standout is Allison Littlewood’s ‘‘The Art of Escapeology’’, which at first seems to be an entry in the grand tradition of fantasies about strange circuses, with a little boy cajoling his father into attending a performance by a traveling troupe. But when his father is selected from the audience to participate in a trick that invokes the ghost of Houdini, the story takes a turn for the dark and complex, exploring the way members of a family can become strangers to one another, and cataloging some of the figurative chains that bind us.

  ‘‘Cad Coddeu’’ by Liz Williams is one of the few stories not set in the contemporary world, a retelling/reinterpretation of an ancient Welsh poem, ‘‘The Battle of the Trees’’, about a struggle among shapeshifting animal people and warrior trees; it’s strange, evocative, and altogether wonderful. Robert Shearman, who seldom writes the same kind of story twice, gives us ‘‘Dumb Lucy’’, a tale of a traveling magician and his mute assistant (of the title) attempting to bring people joy and make a living in a weird post-apocalyptic world. The ongoing disaster in the background – apparently a war between angels and demons with Earth as the battleground – eventually overtakes the main characters, with consequences that are both cosmic and surprising. Shearman’s best stories end with a shock of strange wonder, and this is no exception.

  Other worthwhile stories here include ‘‘Domestic Magic’’ by Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem, about a troubled teenage boy with an erratic and neglectful mother who can actually do magic – though he’d gladly trade her power for some stability. Lou Morgan’s ‘‘Bottom Line’’ is a fast-moving and satisfying crime story about gangsters exploiting the possibilities of magic. Gemma Files’s ‘‘Nanny Grey’’ is a short, sharp-edged piece about a small-time thief who talks (and seduces) his way into the home of a spoiled, vapid rich girl… who turns out to be more than she seems, with a dangerous family secret. Thana Niveau’s ‘‘First and Last and Always’’ has a classic ‘‘be careful what you wish for’’ plot, with a young woman casting a love spell with disastrous consequences, but the skillful depiction of an obsessive personality makes it stand out.

  Overall, the 15 stories here encompass a wide range of magic, from the ritual to the inexplicable, the practical to the numinous, with something to suit nearly every taste in the fantastic.

  –Tim Pratt

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  CORY DOCTOROW: TEN YEARS ON

  On February 5, 2013, Tor Teen published Homeland, the sequel to my first YA novel, Little Brother. As I write this in January ’13, I’m just gearing up for the tour, which mostly involves sending semi-form e-mails to nice people who’ve asked me to do something time-consuming, explaining that I’ve only got two weeks left until I disappear into the Tour, wherein I will see 22 cities in 29 days and never once come up for air, and so I’ve got to get everything done now or I’ll never get it done then.

  I never thought I’d write a sequel. The allure of writing books has always been the experience of discovering and exploring a place and people that have been cooked up by my imagination. By the time I’ve squeezed the book out through my fingertips, I’m generally pretty sick of that place and those people, and frankly glad to be shut of them. But a sequel to Little Brother happened, and when it was done, I discovered that I’d thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like discovering that a whole gang of close friends I’d lost touch with after high-school had stayed tight, and were happy to welcome me back into their bosom. Thoroughly enjoyed it? It was amazing.

  Cory Doctorow

  Back to February 2013. When my publisher told me that the book would come out on Feb 5, I immediately flashed back on Feb 3, 2003, ten years and two days before the publication of Homeland, when my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published. D&O was all kinds of firsts: the first novel I’d ever written, the first book of mine Tor ever published, and the first Creative Commons licensed novel – ever. It’s shocking to think that an entire decade has roared past in the interim, with 14 more books in print, and another two (Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, a nonfiction book; and Anda’s Game, a full-length graphic novel from First Second) in the pipeline.

  Realizing that I was a decade into my writing career literally staggered me. I missed a step while walking down the street and nearly fell over.

  And then I realized I had no idea what novel I’d write next. I have notes for about five books, but none of them feel quite… ripe. The closest is probably a prequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – it would be awfully nice to check in on those old friends and see what they’re up to after a decade. Down and Out is a utopian novel, modelled in part on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, a brilliant, absolutely engrossing novel about a zoning fight over a baseball diamond in a small town in a future Orange County where all of humanity’s existential problems have been decisively solved.

  Utopian fiction is often characterized as optimistic fiction, because it’s fiction about a future where the existential crisis is behind us – where we know that whatever else transpires, we are likely to survive as a species. Our children and their children will live. Our deeds will not be forgotten. Life will go on.

  It’s tempting to say that people who are happy in the midst of peace and plenty are doing nothing much of much. This, of course, isn’t true. Being miserable or happy has as much to do with your internal state as it does with the stuff going on in the rest of the world. Safety and a lack of material want is not guarantee of happiness – indeed, for the traumatized, it’s a the quiet moments when the yammering ghosts of past horrors can be heard best.

  The thing I loved about Pacific Edge is how good the people were, even as they got in each other’s way and fought with one another and made things miserable for each other. Robinson’s book is a tour-de-force character novel that is deeply compassionate about the way that people of good will and good faith can trip each other up. And it is ‘‘utopian,’’ in the sense that it is all set in a time/place where technology doesn’t threaten to get away from its creators and destroy them.

  Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that writing books in which people act good while not facing much existential adversity is a kind of easy optimism. Much more interesting are stories about people who behave well when they are at risk for life and limb: the person who shares with his neighbor when doing so might mean his own starvation; the person who takes in an orphan when she can hardly feed her own children. In short, the most optimistic fiction you can write is fiction where people treat each other well under conditions of crisis.

  This is a narrative we desperately need to hear. In crisis – in the horrible, slow-motion, global economic/environmental catastrophe that we inhabit – we form theories about how everyone else will react and plan accordingly. When Katrina hit, people nodded when soldiers and mercenaries shot ‘‘looters’’ in New Orleans, convinced that looting was the sort of thing that transpired after disasters. That was news. Hardly noticed, months after the fact, was the truth that there was practically no looting in post-Katrina New Orleans, and that those shot – particularly those shot by Blackwater mercenaries – were inn
ocents who’d been killed in the service of a lie: the lie that human beings are bad, and that the first thing we do when the veneer of civilization falls away is kill, rape, and/or eat one another. This lie was a racist lie, and it was a speciest lie, too.

  This is the worst kind of lie: the lie that makes itself true. When enough people believe the libel against the human race, the vile calumny that ‘‘human nature’’ would have us all at each others’ throats were it not for coercive force, it becomes a truth. If you are sure your neighbor will kill you when the lights go out, the natural thing to do is kill him at the first flicker – and even if you’re more reasonable than that, you still won’t want to let a potential killer into your shelter; you won’t want to share your food with him; you won’t want to take in his children when they need it.

  In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I gloss over the technological revolution that leads to a world without scarcity, mortality, or want. But ten years later, as the world divides into the hyper-rich 1% – the richest 100 of whom could end world poverty four times over with their personal fortunes – and the vast precariat of people who can’t seem to make enough to live or save enough to carry them through their dotage, it’s all I can think of. As robots take all the old jobs and the benefits of automation are funneled into fewer and fewer hands, all I can think of is, what would happen if only we could play fair? If we didn’t have to chop down our descendants’ trees to get the food that we need to eat today? If we could stop compromising ourselves to make things and sell things and do things that we know aren’t quite right, but that are somehow necessary to make ends meet.