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Ursula K. Le Guin died  in 2018, with many highly distinguished books under her belt, plus a few real clunkers. Now comes Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats, from the Library of America, a slim hardcover with poems, some prose, and a whole lot of cat doodles by Le Guin, plus a lot of white space. No editor is listed, but one hears someone else's voice in the essay "The Lives of Ursula's Cats."  Overall it seems either a harmless ditty, or crass commercialism. This is one of her clunkers. For ailurophiles only. 

Every once in a while, when the modern world seems especially insane, I read another Philip K. Dick book as a kind of therapy.  Last time it was Time Out of Joint, ten years ago. On this very blog.  I concluded:  "I wonder: has the modern world come too closely to resemble Philip Dick's mindscape, that the impact of his novels is lessened?"

This time, I picked up Galactic Pot-Healer, and came away with similar if slightly different feelings. Earthman Joe Fernwright has a dead-end job, with diminished prospects, fixing ceramic pots, in a future America that seems depressingly familiar to our own present, with an overreaching government that is bent on repressing speech and thought, and crushing dissent and artistic expression. The Glimmung is a strange and powerful being on Plowman's Planet, who brings Joe Fernwright and a host of various odd aliens there to raise an ancient sunken cathedral named Heldscalla from the deep ocean. There these beings discourse on the meaning of life and whether the ever-updating Book of the Kalends is completely prophetic. The Earth-based initial chapters were almost too painful to read, but once Joe Fernwright gets to Plowman's Planet, Dick's bizarre imagination takes over. The ending doesn't quite live up to the set-up, but it still is a window into Dick's highly unusual brain. 

Dick wrote an earlier short children's novel about the Glimmung that was published posthumously as Nick and the Glimmung. There is a joy in reading it that is lacking in this adult novel. 

In the wake of the popularity of the first Addams Family television series, which ran from 1964-1966, cartoonist Charles Addams published The Chas. Addams Mother Goose, an oversized volume which contains some twenty-seven familiar nursery rhymes, each accompanied by one or more Addams illustrations that give a macabre interpretation to the nursery rhyme. It is pleasant for what it is, but one could wish for a volume with four or five times the number of nursery rhymes.  Here are a few examples, enough to decide whether the humor is for you or not. 

                                                       Girls and boys,                                                          Come out to play.                                                       The moon does shine                                                         As bright as day.                                                       Come with a hoop.                                                         Come with a cal,                                                       Come with a good will,                                                         Or not at all.  

Fairy tales, by their original oral natures, are often retold, with variations, and they are often reworked with different ideologies involved. Perhaps the best of such reworkings are the feminist versions by Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber) and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood). In Tales from Beyond the Rainbow, we have ten stories of a slightly different sort: LGBTQ+ tales "proudly reclaimed" by Pete Jodi Wood. What this seems to mean is that Wood has found tales from around the world that might (or might not) reflect same-sex pairings or gender issues, ones that he states are "ripe for reclamation and reinterpretation." In the introduction Wood virtue-signals the claim that he has "tried to stick as closely as possible to the original narratives, while updating the tales for contemporary readers through sensitivity to the depiction of different genders and identities and their pronoun choice, and with an emphasis on the overall positive portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters. I have worked with authenticity readers from around the world..." Despite some notes "About the tales" at the rear of the book, which purport to give the original sources, the reader isn't very convinced by the editor's proclamations. The one tale I knew beforehand is "The Soldier and the Peasant," which comes from the Brothers Grimm, where it ends with two men deciding to live together to share their gold. Should they be read as a same sex couple? Wood thinks so, but that seems a stretch. Another, "The Spinners and the Sorcerer," is feminist but not specifically LGBTQ+. A small format book with spacious type, this volume doesn't amount to much. The polemics of current woke ideas are sometimes hammered into the text, and it makes one wonder how much these examples of woke principals might change over the next decade or longer, perhaps leaving these tales dated and out of fashion. Also, each tale has a couple of illustrations by a different artist ("many from the LGBTQ+ community"), a small headpiece at the beginning, and one full-page illustration, but all are in black and white, which limits the appreciation. Overall, a disappointing book. 
 

Why I Love Horror, subtitled "Essays on Horror Literature," is a collection of nineteen essays--one by the book's editor Becky Siegel Spratford, the others by various current horror writers, with an introduction by Sadie Hartmann (responsible for a crappy nonfiction title, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered). I picked this up not because I think the essays on horror literature will offer many new insights, but because I've never read ten or so of the writers included, and I wanted to sample their critical thinking and writing style via their essays. I suppose, if I had thought of it beforehand, I could have predicted the result. The authors that I have read before and liked stood out as better writers and better thinkers than most of the ones I'd never encountered before. Writers like Tananarive Due, Paul Tremblay, and Victor LaValle stood out for their style and content.  Writers I've encountered before and found lacking, like Brian Keene and Grady Hendrix, have unengaging contributions. A few authors I've encountered only in short stories and  have mixed or undecided opinions about, including John Langan and Stephen Graham Jones, did not win me over with their essays. Some of the contributions to this book are made up of personal histories, written up in a ubiquitous blog style. Sadly I found no new authors that I want to rush out and read. 

This is the Victorian-styled story of a young girl, Faith, who wants to be a naturalist like her reverend father, but she must work in the shadows as she is stymied by being female. At the heart of the story is a mysterious plant, called the Lie Tree, which possibly has biblical associations, and which is sought by rivals of her father while he experiments with its magical yet sinister properties. These studies lead to his public shaming, to the family's exile to a small island, then to his death--or is it murder, as Faith comes to believe? The story is interesting and has some qualities of a page-turner, but most of the characters are undeveloped stock figures, and the writing is lackluster and often flawed. Harding frequently resorts to awkward metaphors that pull the reader right out of the tale (e.g., "the smell was a snow-bite behind her eyes" and "the trees flung up their boughs like drowning sailors"--what do these mean?). It is gob-smacking that this pretty average novel won awards like the Costa Book of the Year and the Boston-Globe Horn Book Award. I wonder if the competition was even worse.

This is an early novel by Catherine Fisher, who is perhaps best known for Incarceron, the first of a series. The Candle Man is a stand-alone young adult novel from thirteen years earlier. It is a curious tale about the conflict between a kind of water witch, Hafren, who wants to initiate a record flooding of some towns along the Severn Estuary (called in Welsh the Aber Hafred--Hafren being the name of a legendary figure drowned in the Severn, giving the river its name), and she is opposed by Meurig, the Candle Man of the title, who is aided by a rather dull young boy Conor and a more sensible young girl, Sara. Meurig is called the Candle Man because in an earlier encounter with Hafren, the witch paired Meurig's life with the diminishing length of a candle, which becomes controlled by Hafren, and Meurig and the children go to a surreal island in an attempt to get it back. The tale is rather short, and not especially ambitious, but some of its ideas and imagery are unusual, which gives it some attraction.  

 A couple of years ago I enjoyed R.J. Ivankovic's H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers, noting that it was simplified Lovecraft in creaky verse with illustrations in the style of Dr. Seuss. H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon for Beginning Readers is the follow-up--and it's basically more of the same. If you like the concept of the book, you will likely enjoy the book.  I understand there is now a third title in the series:  H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, which I will read in the future.  
 

In Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, a short novella published in 1894, Helen Vaughan is the mysterious femme fatale who dies horribly at the end. In Rosanne Rabinowitz’s Helen’s Story, a slightly longer sequel to Machen’s story published in 2013, we learn that Helen Vaughan didn’t die--Machen made that up. She is immortal, both Pan’s daughter and Pan’s lover. In modern days Helen is an avant-garde artist in Shoreditch in London, whose paintings are immersive, bringing together inside the art her fans and critics into amazing gender-bending and boundary-defying orgies. Yawn. What a deflation from Machen’s threatening and literally soulless character into to a mere modern bohemian artist. Detached from the associations with Machen, it might have made a better tale, but with its primary motivation being to undermine Machen's classic story it is itself  diminished by the comparison.

Daniel Pinkwater has been writing books for children and young adults for many decades. I read through a number of them in the 1980s and 1990s, including Fat Men from Space, for younger children, and classics like The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death and its sequel The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, about two boys who "snarkout"--that is, sneak out to midnight shows at the Snark movie theater. Most of Pinkwater's books are about smart misfits and their zany adventures, and they are a lot of fun. I think the last Pinkwater I read was his one adult novel, The Afterlife Diet, about a heaven for fat people. In Jules, Penny & the Rooster, Jules is a young girl who, according to prophecy, will save the hidden forest --populated by witches, fairies and little bald-headed guys --with help from Penny (the collie dog she won) and their friend the rooster.  It this sounds silly, that's because it is, but it is also packed with wit and odd characters, like the bookseller "Rana Aullando" (Howling Frog, in Esperanto). It's not Pinkwater's best book, but it is a typical one. 

I saw a new movie, Clown in a Cornfield. It's a vapid mess, filled with cliches upon cliches, and with characters whose actions and motivations do not make any sense. It is plotted like a roller-coaster ride, and once you are strapped in, you follow it to the end, slightly amused by a few unexpected twists. I learned it was based on a novel, so out of absurd curiosity, I read the novel to see if it makes any more sense than the movie. In short, it doesn't.  It's written as a thriller-- in simple words to pad out the screenplay plot. The movie streamlines the plot, and alters many things. But the characters still operate as the author needs them to instead of within the context of their situation. As one character puts in in the middle of the book, "she had no idea why any of her dumbass friends did the dumbass things they did."  Neither does the reader. More bewilderingly I learn there are two sequels Clown in a Cornfield 2 and Clown in a Cornfield 3. I can't see a market for such books or movies beyond vacuous teens, but they must be a multitude.

Jack Zipes is some months shy of 88, He is a renowned scholar of folklore and fairy tales, including critical works as well as translations and anthologies. The Wrath of Peace or How the Wellikans Saved the World is a story written for and dedicated to his grandchildren Anya and Little Jack, about two twin witches Anja and Zack who try to save the world from the evil dictator Nexus with help from the Wellikans, a hidden and underground magical people. Nexus is described in completely Trumpian terms, a man born to be a "genius" who became bitter, narcissistic and cruel on his way to rule the world, using poisons to diminish the humanity of the people he rules over. The blurb on the rear cover says: "it is a hopeful tale of resistance and defiance," but the manner in which Anja and Zack laugh and dance their way through the story belies the seriousness of how to resist a real world tyrant. Still what's left is a mostly pleasant short tale (about ninety pages), but the feel-good attitude about how to deal with Nexus  diminishes both the impact of the story and its relevance to the modern world.

The Bone Man is a novelette from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007, here published as a chapbook with illustrations by Daniel Williams. Durbin's story begins familiarly: a traveler stumbles upon some sort of local festival in an unnamed Midwestern town. Here the stranger is a hit man, Conlin, who has just finished a job. He comes to a town on Halloween that is preparing for an annual parade for The Bone Man, an animate skeleton who can only be seen by some people. Conlin is intrigued, and stays for the festival. Durbin notes in a six-page Afterword that the town takes some aspects from Sauk City, Wisconsin, the home of his first publisher, Arkham House, who released his novel Dragonfly in 1999. Durbin has published two other books, a novel A Green and Ancient Light in 2016; and a serial from Cricket Magazine  as The Star Shard in 2012. The Bone Man is well-written and stylistically appealing, and because of this I ordered copies of all three of Durbin's books. The illustrations by Daniel Williams are symbolic rather than representative of the plot, but they complement it nicely.

The ingredients used to make this novel promise something delectable. There is a deceased and disreputable writer,  Cyril Heldman, who wrote weird and occultish tales and who died under very strange circumstances. His literary executor, Catherine Richards, whose house is crammed full of books, papers, newspapers, herself dies bizarrely in the first chapter: by falling from the sky onto the nearby roof of her longtime friend Tanya Sewell, who is also Catherine's niece, after meeting and marrying Tanya's widowed uncle years earlier. Tanya inherits Catherine's house, which she had known in childhood, and becomes involved in several mysteries, particularly to do with an online forum devoted to Heldman that has its usual share of cranks and trolls. Add to this an unscrupulous book dealer and a collector of occult artifacts, bent on finding Heldman's relic called the Sixtystone (lifted from one of Arthur Machen's tales), which was the subject of one of Heldman's novels, and you have the basics of an intriguing literary weird tale. The writing, too, is fine, but somewhere along the line, the characters begin to act in ways that don't fit with how they were established, and they make decisions that move the plot forward at the expense of literary belief; and the workings of the Sixtystone, never really set forth, are variable enough to belie concrete aspects of the plot and leave important points (like the methodology of strange deaths) without any context. The result is somewhat unsatisfying, but it is a mostly pleasant read to reach the end of the novel. 

Novelist Andrew Michael Hurley has published what is basically a thirteen story collection, centered around a fictional border town between Yorkshire and Lancashire called Barrowbeck. This provides a thin skein that connects the stories, and the hint that the setting is something rather more significant enters into only a few of the tales. The first is set in the distant past, while the final story is set in 2041 in a post-climate crisis. These bookends turn out to be the best in the book, while the rest are various kinds of oddities. A baby is grown from a plant by a kind of witch for a childless couple. Disadvantaged children are bussed into the town for a day to enjoy life before being taken back to their grim existence--this inspires one local boy to an unusual solution. A domestic story of two close sisters turns very cryptic at the end when a B&B guest returns to find them cocooned in a back room. Hurley plays with different styles, and with different types of story, but most feel fragmentary and as a whole the collection remains less than satisfactory, though not without some high points.

This book looked interesting. Two college associates secretly experiment with extra-sensory perception, and one encounters some old mirrors of obsidian of a type associated with Dr. Dee, Edward Kelly and ancient Aztec worship. But any interest is quickly ruined by the style. The book has three main characters, the conniving and mysterious Doctor Wiston, and the researcher Gwyn Thomas, who is doing some kind of sensory deprivation experiments on John Born, who then has visions and becomes obsessed with mirrors. The setting, per the blurb, is the University of Cambridge, but no location is specified in the novel. Within the first few pages we learn that Born is already dead, and the novel plays out as a kind of unnatural compendium of mixed perspectives that shift all too quickly between characters (and the dead Born's very descriptive letters he wrote to his mother). As a technique this might be made workable, but the real problem lies in the unfathomable motivations of the characters. Wiston, who is not directly involved in the experiments, happens to be a collector of antique mirrors (and a gourmand--all food is lovingly described at length), and manipulates the other two without the reader ever being let in on what he is up to--which on its own seems to change through the book. So it all comes across as a bunch of unfortunate and cryptic scenes without causal logic that add up to nothing other than boredom.

The idea of a novel set in and around the late 17th century Paris salon meetings of Madame d'Aulnoy, where modern fairy tales came to life, seems like a good idea. Or at least an interesting one. What Clare Pollard presents is more of a kaleidoscopic documentary than a novel. And it's filled with twenty-first century diction, and various contemporary "isms": feminism, sexism, lesbianism, etc., along with the author's sharp take on free speech and authoritarian rule,  and her poised comparisons of what are to us well known fairy tales with the people and activities of the era. The result is not bad, but far from satisfying, for the reader is never pulled into the novel or the numerous characters (some are so much alike as to be confusing--and I referred many times to the two-page cast of characters at the beginning of the book in an attempt to recall who was who), and occasionally the author breaks the fourth wall to comment on the evolving story. The endless descriptions of clothing and makeup are tedious. Angela Carter did stuff like this decades ago, and rather better.

I liked Clarke's previous novel, Piranesi (I reviewed it here on Jan. 12, 2022), so the idea of a new book by her attracted my attention. Disappointment after disappointment followed. First, I learned the book is only sixty-three pages: so, a novella at best. But then I got a copy. Nineteen of those pages are publishing matter, or illustrations without text. Eleven pages have only a small amount of text, and in the rest of the book, the text is generously double-spaced. What remains is a mere short story, bloated by many illustrations, and further bloated by a nine page afterword by the author which is primarily a why-I-wrote-this-story-and-why-I-like-Kate-Bush confession. Yawn. The story was written as a Christmas 2022 radio broadcast. Though nowhere evident in the tale, Clarke claims in her afterword that it is set in the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This means nothing. What's left is a short quasi-fairy-tale about a young nineteen year old girl who ventures into a wood at snowy midwinter with her talking animals (two dogs and a pig), and she has conversations with other animals and the wood itself. She tells them she wants a child of her own, and something mysterious happens. That's all. Shame on the publisher for putting out this money-grubbing contrivance.

A collection of nine stories by Mark Samuels, who passed away suddenly in December 2023, after this collection had been put together. Seven of the stories are arranged as "The Gallows Langley Sequence of Tales," as they are all set in and around fictional places in Hertfordshire, including the town Gallows Langley and the valley of Thool--a setting used previously by Samuels, most notably in the novel Witch-Cult Abbey (which I reviewed previously on this blog on February 14, 2021). Six of the seven of these stories are excellent--the final one "A Letter from Jack" is made somewhat lesser by the bringing in of Jack the Ripper, which was just too trite for me. The rest of the sequence develops an attractively bizarre and decadently otherworldly fictional setting. The two uncollected stories reprinted in the section "Other Tales" begin with some imminent or ongoing eschatological catastrophe, but disappointingly don't carry on with the repercussions of it, evolving into smaller and less interesting character studies. Overall this still a pretty good collection, beautifully produced, but it is bittersweet in that it is the last work of Samuels, whose voice will be missed.

Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz have written two screenplays, both unproduced, and both now published by Chiroptera Press. The first was Crampton, a 2000 reworking of a 1998 proposed X-Files episode into an original full length feature. It appeared in print in 2002, and was reprinted by Chiroptera Press in early 2024. (I reviewed this edition in this blog on March 17, 2024.) The second, Michigan Basement, was written soon after Crampton, and it is now published for the first time. Its breezy introduction by Brandon Trenz notes that it was begun as an attempt to adapt Ligotti’s Lovecraftian short story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” into a film, and the filmscript retains the basic idea of an academic encountering a very weird town festival, but it adds much to it, and cannot in the end really be considered an adaptation of Ligotti’s story. Michigan Basement follows Jeffrey Haller, haunted as a boy by Nightwatchers, who becomes an anthropology student (and later instructor), mentored by one Dr. A. Rekalde. Some years after Haller has broken with Rekalde, Haller receives enigmatic communications that lead him to a bizarre winter carnival in the small decayed town of Skinner, Michigan, which includes clowns and which reunites Haller, Rekalde, and the Nightwatchers. It’s not a terrible read, but it over-utilizes filmic cliches while it under-utilizes the elements of Ligotti’s prose that makes his stories so interesting. Admittedly, those qualities would perhaps be impossible to translate into a visual medium. In the end, if produced, Michigan Basement would have ended up as a offtrail B-movie that promised more than it could ever have delivered.

This is the definitive book on the zany eccentric London record label Stiff Records, which was founded in 1976 and lasted through 1986, promoting punk, ska, jazzy rock, the new wave, and traditional rock. Acts that got their start at Stiff include The Damned, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Wreckless Eric, Rachel Sweet, Lene Lovich, Madness, and the Pogues, among many others. The narrative is typical of rock histories: the story comes from what got represented in the contemporary music press, bolstered by interviews with some of the people involved --at least, those who were still alive around 2014. If I knew that Stiff had released in the US, back in late 1980, a publicity stunt of an EP entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan" comprising 40 minutes of complete silence, then I had completely forgotten it. Those were the days! One wishes for some entity like Stiff Records to exist today.

Katherine Rundell is not a stupid person. She is an Oxford-educated academic, and after holding similar fellowships, she is now a Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.  As a side-gig she has published some ten or so books, including novels and books actually aimed at children, and an award-winning  biography of John Donne, the subject of her thesis. So why, then, is Impossible Creatures such a bad book?  It has no literary quality beyond superficial imitation. It is a slapdash amalgam of tropes, characters, scenes, etc., lifted from other (better) fantasies, thrown together with minimal thought to make a plot-driven result that doesn't bother to make its causal progressions of scene-to-scene have necessary internal sense. Set in the Archipelago (a pale version of Le Guin's Earthsea), where a young girl obtains a casapasaran (e.g. like Pullman's alethiometer) and a Glamry Blade (like Pullman's Subtle Knife), it also adds various echoes of Tolkien--the Glimourie Tree, a singular version of his Two Trees; a riddle match with a Sphinx, far less interesting than that of Bilbo and Gollum--among other authors, and even from various movies (e.g., Indiana Jones), etcetera, etcetera. This is second-rate commercial product at best. Why would an intelligent person do something like this?  My only guess is the readership is aimed at the producers and directors of various streaming services, which is where the bigger money lies. Impossible Creatures would make a typical vapid mini-series (which may or may not be improved by insidious directors or screenwriters), with all the emotional wallop of a superhero movie aimed at pre-teens. (Of course the ending would need to be changed.) Even the lovely map by Tomiskav Tomic, reproduced in color on the endpapers, doesn't allow the reader to follow the travels of the main characters. And the prose is occasionally laughable. Witness these clunkers: "He looked like a crime scene on legs." ""She walked with the look of a moveable battleground."  "His heart was an iron spike."

Jackal, Jackal is a collection of some eighteen stories ("tales of the dark and fantastic" according to the book's subtitle) by Nigerian physician and writer Tobi Ogundiran, who wrote his first two stories (both collected herein) as recently as 2017. There is a welcome variety of types of stories in this collection, which mixes African cultural aspects with a wide range of Western literary tropes. Stephen King is evoked in a number of stories, while others play with fairy tales or fairy tale characters (e.g., Hansel and Gretel, or Baba Yaga). and one (the final story, "The Goatkeeper's Harvest") is Lovecraftian without mentioning silly Mythos names. All are well-written, and engaging. This is Ogundiran's first book (a fantasy novella is due out in July 2024), making for a strong debut. 

This is an odd book, covering some aspects of the cancellation and censorship that some would impose upon literature, of which trigger warnings (about potentially uncomfortable content) is amongst the worst. John Sutherland writes from the bemused position of an old literary man, taking various examples from the daily newspapers and recounting them, putting (needed) context around the texts, but never really taking a stand for denouncing the busybodies who want to erect barriers or put up prohibitions between people and the books they might want to read. Which is not to say this is a bad book per se. There is a lot of interesting context on various challenged books. But Sutherland's overall attitude seems like that of someone who doesn't want to stir the pot. Too bad.

In addition to Philip Pullman's substantial fantasies, His Dark Materials (three volumes) and The Book of Dust (two volumes published, the third, at present, forthcoming), Pullman has published some short companion volumes to the series. These are small illustrated books--Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine, and The Collectors-- basically short stories published on their own. Now comes The Imagination Chamber: Cosmic Rays from Lyra's Universe, which is pure commercial product. The publisher claims that "this is a book like no other"--that much is true--and "it contains untold riches"--the emphasis should be on "untold" for nothing told here contains any riches.  Furthermore, the publisher boasts: "Every page will give you an exciting glimpse into Lyra's world. Every page will give you an astonishing insight into the storytelling mind of Philip Pullman."  Well, the book is 87 pages, but (with one exception in the short foreword) all left-hand pages are completely blank, and the right-hand pages have usually one small paragraph of text (at most four paragraphs) that seem to be passages pulled out of Pullman's various drafts of the manuscripts of the books he has already published. The text is unburdened by illustrations. Very disappointing overall, and the only insight I found is to wonder why Pullman should have seen fit to publish such a blatant rip-off of his readers. Haven't his other books sold enough copies? Is he really in need of more money?