Time for the next issue of Lightspeed Magazine. October was a horror themed issue. I don’t read a lot of horror, and even less science fiction horror. Mostly I stay away from the genre because scary makes me tense and anxious, and I don’t like that.¹ However, an occasional read here or there is just fine. This is my favorite issue of the magazine, so far. The fiction was pretty disturbing, so it fit the horror bill pretty well. The non-fiction still feels really light and introductory to me. I really wish the editors would include at least one fairly deep science article every issue.

Hindsight by Sarah Langan

Black Betty appears within our solar system. Black Betty is a point of contact between our universe and another universe with very different laws of physics. Everything starts going screwy: birth defects, magnetism. Humanity reacts badly. An escape ship is built, except we can’t escape by zooting out of the solar system. Where would we go? So they decide to head into the anomaly, hoping to transition to the other universe. Nothing in the experience goes well exactly. A good story, though it didn’t really have that sense of dread that I think makes a horror story. I didn’t particularly worry about what was going to happen to the main family in the story. Perhaps that because the story focused so much on the current hell they were going through rather than how much worse it could be.

Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back by Joe R. Lansdale

The scenario starts off pretty standardly: scientists emerge from underground fortress after nuclear war. It’s not a zombie story. I’m glad, because I inevitably compare post-apocalyptic zombie stories to Night of the Coment. What the scientists face is a whole nuther ball of wax. This one gets kudos not because the horror and dread is all that great (I didn’t really feel it) but for being a creative way to make something disturbing.

The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz

Fultz’ story starts off similarly to one of the stories that became a chapter in Allen Steele’s Coyote. Man in suspended animation on the way to a distant colony planet is awakened early and has to face the rest of the long voyage alone. In both stories, the crewman goes a bit mad. In Fultz’ story, the key is that there isn’t enough food stored on board the ship for the crewman to last the entire voyage and he’s the only person on the ship who can operate equipment that will be needed by the colony. The colony is already established, but is failing due to the lack of the equipment. Crewman is on the rescue mission. After he eats the limited rations, he starts to look around for other sustenance and there’s only him and a few other crewmen on the ship, the rest in suspended animation. You can guess where this is going. Pretty good. Very disturbing. I do not want to read this story again.

Beachworld by Stephen King

Two crewman crash land on a desert world comprised as far as the eye can see by dunes of sand. No food and little water. Will they get rescued before they starve? Oh yeah, and the sand has a hypnotizing effect. Not quite as disturbing as the previous story, but with Stephen King, you know bad stuff is going to happen.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: October 2010 (#5)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Scott Grimando

I’ve read five James Tiptree, Jr. Award winners before now and thought very highly of all of them. This is the first I’ve read that I had trouble with, though on the whole I think it’s a solid book.

Katherine Sweeney Cassidy starts to attend University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine. There she meets Oliver Crawford and Angelica di Rienzi, members of the beautiful people. They are pretty, and rich, and legacies, and sleeping together. Sweeney falls madly in love with Oliver though he expresses no interest beyond friendship, and they hang out endlessly.

Meanwhile, the University is actually the headquarters for an ancient order of (possibly) magicians, the Benandanti, like the Illuminati only more secret and powerful. At the beginning of the book, they get a sign. It involves Angelica and Oliver. A Benandanti traitor gives Angelica an ancient crescent broach that has a connection to pre-Christian goddess cults of Europe, which the Benandanti have been carefully suppressing for millenia.

And what does Sweeney have to do with it? She’s sand in the gearworks, essentially. She serves as both narrator and as something to come between Angelica and Oliver. It seemed to me that her infatuation with Oliver was induced by sorcery. Anyhow, in a plot-line that is obvious from near the beginning, everything is building up to a confrontation between the patriarchy protecting Benandanti and a woman-centered goddess cult revival.

Mostly I really enjoyed the things that I suspect contributed to this winning the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. The goddess cult is more along the lines of Kali the Destroyer than Aphrodite. Key to the cults are sacrifices, usually of men. The book is not for the squeamish. The women are not bloodthirsty, but along stereotypical lines of Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction. They are not just shrill, crazy harpies, but intelligent driven characters with purpose. The whole sense of impending collision between the Benandanti and the Moon Goddess is chilling.

But there are some drawbacks too, mostly in writing style rather than thematic substance. The book is far too long at 497 pages, particularly given that I knew exactly where it was going early on. Hand includes lengthy descriptions of everything that happens. A fight with a bull takes two plus pages, when it could have been a couple of paragraphs.

In addition, at the beginning everything is told from Sweeney’s point of view. She’s not part of either side in the clash of religions, due to be rather normal rather than gifted. This makes the opposing sides rather dark and mysterious from Sweeney’s perspective. Mysterious and scary is good for horror. But midway through the book Ms. Hand starts telling parts of the story from other people’s viewpoints, particularly Angelica di Rienzi who is a champion of the goddess cults. Told from her point of view, she became familiar to me as a reader, rather than being othered in the cults. From a feminist perspective, this is awesome; she gets her own voice. For a horror reader though, it takes away a lot of her scary factor.

For some folks, my issues won’t be a problem. Many of the reviews I’ve read of the book laud the lush descriptions that I thought tedious. For others, the clash of cults will be totally off-putting rather than cool.

Title: Waking the Moon
Author: Elizabeth Hand
Cover creator: Gene Mydlowski
Imprint / publisher: HarperPrism / HarperCollins
Length: 497 p.
Publication date: 1995
ISBN-10: 0-06-105443-7

In a few weeks, Big Mouth Press (aka Small Beer Press) releases Holly Black’s collection of short stories, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. It’s a mix of fantasy and horror, most featuring adolescent or college age characters. These well-written stories aren’t light, happy reading. But then, you should expect dark and complex with a title like The Poison Eaters.

Most of the stories feature characters who are somewhat outcast. They fight themselves more than they do anyone or anything else. Sometimes that sort of inner conflict bores me to yawns, but each of these characters have personality that makes them interesting.

One side note, just to get my opinion out there. Nominally targeted at the young adult market, this collection contains dark stories that include sex (not graphic) and that glorify drinking and partying. These stories don’t teach lessons about how it’s better to behave like an adult. These things are by no means foreign to young adult stories, so my opinion isn’t unusual. My opinion: kids can handle anything and everything thrown at them in a book. I’ve never once met a teen that needed to be protected from anything in any book I’ve ever read. Stuff like this book is the antidote that adults get to counteract the bullshit sheltering they received when they were younger. Worries about what kids can handle are really worries about what the adults can handle.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

This story made a couple of Year’s Best anthologies for good reason. Vampires have the coolness factor that they do in Twilight, eternal life (undeath) and eternal parties, though they are quarantined off in Coldtowns in most cities because of how infectious they are. Matilda has been bitten, but is trying to sweat out the incubation period rather than give in to the blood lust that would turn her. She doesn’t want to be a vampire. Her ex-boyfriend who she’s still in love with and his new girl want to become vampires though. One of the few vampire tales I’ve read in a while that really engaged me.

A Reversal of Fortune

A teen signs a pact with the devil to save her dog. If she beats the devil in a contest, the dog is saved. If she loses, she loses her soul. The contest she chooses is an eating competition, and she gets her overweight brother to train her. I think what makes the story is the set-up where Nikki meets the devil on the bus and then spend the day working at the mall, which isn’t the fun time she imagined when she took the job.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

This story was left out of the review copy I received.

The Night Market

A second deal with the devil kind of story. Set in the Philippines, Tomasa’s sister Eva has been snared by an enkanto, a faery of some sort, and lies wasting at home. Tomasa tries to get the enkanto to make her better, and when it refuses ventures into the faery night market looking for someone who can. A little more confusing than the previous story though.

The Dog King

Intelligent wolves terrorize the countryside, but the residents of the stone-walled city are safe inside until people mysteriously start dying. The king promises his throne to the knight who can kill the wolf causing all the havoc. Of course, it can’t be the king’s tamed wolf, can it? This one had me rooting for the wolf.

Virgin

Jen has a thing for Zachary, a homeless teenage junkie. He’s got the looks that girls draw obsessively in the corners of their notebooks. But Zachary tells a wild tale about watching his mom die in the woods after which a unicorn befriends him. Messed up kids have messed up lives, and this ends up messed up for everyone.

In Vodka Veritas

The lightest story in the collection. The king of the prep school nerds gets stood up by his fellow outcast best buddy Danny on prom night. The friend actually got asked to prom. Our hero’s plan is to get dressed in a tux, break into the old abandoned home of the school on the edge of campus with a bottle of vodka, and get drunk. I’ve had similar plans before when I was young and lonely. His plan is foiled by the Latin club. No one expects the Latin club.

The Coat of Stars

Semi-closeted gay costume designer makes costumes for faeries to try and bring back is youthful crush. Good story, but a little too much clothes-whoring for me to get into it. I dress up as a means to an end, not an end to itself. So I don’t get costume-lust like other people do.

Paper Cuts Scissors

Really liked this one! Justin’s girlfriend Linda knows how to put things in stories. As in, the book in your hand is now changed to include the things Linda wants in it, and those things are no longer in the real world. It doesn’t change the book for other people who have it; just that copy. After an argument between the two, Linda puts herself into a classic Russian novel. Justin, heartbroken, goes to library school to get her out of the story. I mostly don’t like stories written for other writers, but I go ga-ga over stories like this that are written for readers. Perfect.

Going Ironside

A loopy story of faeries attempting to get people to impregnate them. Not my thing.

Untitled (A Modern Faerie Tale Story)

The second story not included in this review copy.

The Poison Eaters

Inventive story of three sisters. They are poison. Touch them and die. It’s hard to explain this story without getting into spoiler territory. Well worth the read.

Four of the stories are must-read: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, A Reversal of Fortune, Paper Cuts Scissors, and The Poison Eaters. All the rest were well-written too. Can’t go wrong buying this one.

One other blogged review:

• Book Nerds

Title: The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
Author: Holly Black
Imprint / publisher: Big Mouth House / Small Beer Press
Format: Advanced reading copy
Length: 156 p. (published version will have 256 p.)
Publication date: Feb 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-63-8

Small Beer Press provided me with an advance review copy of this book. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $12.14 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

It’s the end of the world, or nearly so. We have fought the aliens, and lost. One lowly street performer gives a farewell performance, perhaps for all of humanity. He entertains with lots of dark humor, keeping an audience of decrepit specimens enthralled.

I think technically this is horror, but I don’t know exactly what qualifies it in that genre or into which sub-genres the story goes (I don’t know my horror very well). Perhaps the morbid dystopian humor. Befitting Tor.com calling December 2008 Cthulu month, Farewell Performance includes some references to cephalopods. I had to listen to it a large number of times for a few reasons. First, just to figure out what was going on at first. Second, I was predisposed to tiredness because didn’t get a lot of sleep for a couple of weeks and voices in headphones zonk me out, which I did a couple of times just before the last five minutes or so. And then after getting through it a couple of times for those reasons, I re-queued it just because I liked it. In real life, I generally stop to watch street performers, unless they are preachers or jugglers. Imagining the scene is a lot of what I liked about the story.

Oddly, since I’ve never read anything by the author before, the next podcast in my playlist was another Nick Mamatas story from Escape Pod. As with Farewell Performance, I’ve had to re-start that episode a few times to get my head around it too. But in that case I’ve had to put the story aside for a bit to focus on other things, so there won’t be a post on it for a while.

Title: Farewell Performance (podcast)
Author: Nick Mamatas
Narrator: Geoffrey H. Goodwin
Publisher: Tor.com
Format: MP3 podcast download
Length: 22 minutes

I think I might have enjoyed this medium length horror story more if I were an avid horror reader. It strikes me as the kind of story that has lots of inside references and plays off genre tropes. I’m looking at it from a different perspective because I am not familiar with all these common spots.

Eddie Carroll is a horror anthology editor. He gets a submission for the next year’s Best New Horror anthology from an obscure literary journal. Joe Hill’s story then becomes two stories: the submitted story and a related story where Carroll attempts to find the submission’s author to get him to sign off on the rights. Of course, the obscure writer isn’t exactly well-balanced, so that could be a horror story too.

Best New Horror is filled with all sorts of inside-writer kinds of situations. Fan conventions. Zine editors who have inflated senses of their own importance and under used interpersonal skills. Disdain for the work of an anthologist. Etc. It was too inside the sausage factory for me to enjoy. Writers should write about writers for a general audience only in the most extraordinary of circumstances. That’s my general rule of thumb. Then again, perhaps other people really enjoy that. I bet a lot of budding writers like it.

The other thing that didn’t work for me is that this just wasn’t that full of dread. Oh, it’s scary all right. I just didn’t care whether or not Eddie Carroll got killed or mutilated or sucked off into the nether worlds inhabited by ghost or demons. Or whatever it was that was gonna happen or not happen. (No spoilers here.)

I did like David Ledoux’s narration though. I really need to figure out what the elements of narration are that I should look for so I can make some intelligent commentary. He has a kind of crackly low voice, speaks in a measured pace and measured tones. I can name a few things I haven’t liked about previously listened to narrators, but I hate to tell folks I like this narrator because he/she doesn’t do the things I hated. Anyhow, the slightly gravelly voice of Ledoux is good for a horror piece.

Title: Best New Horror
Author: Joe Hill (Joseph Hillstrom King)
Narrator: David Ledoux
Publisher: Harper Audio
Publication Date: 2007
Format: MP3 download
Length: 57 minutes

I have a love/hate relationship with horror. I don’t want to be completely freaked out, reading only a page or two at a time and peeking at those from between my fingers, and yet horror that doesn’t fill you with some dread is probably not very good. Cherie Priest’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds sat in that middle ground fairly well for me and I quite enjoyed the story.

Eden Moore sees ghosts. As a girl, they are sometimes scary and sometimes helpful. As an adult though, it turns out that Eden is the target of a 165 year old ghost’s plan for resurrection. The resurrector being a mysterious resident from her family’s past, living in a remote swamp in southern Florida.

I really liked the character Eden Moore. She’s frightened at times, stoic at others. Came off very strong to me, not the least a one trick pony. Most of the other characters are very much supporting characters and they only stayed around for a while until the next supporting character stepped up to the plate. I kind of wish some of them had stuck around longer, because they were interesting.

The story was scariest when Eden was a kid early in the book. Good ghost stories don’t have a punch line, as a character in the book states. At the end, we know who the bad guy is, and we know what he’s doing. Effectively, the story becomes action-adventure with ghosts and blood and gore. Priest’s action scenes don’t overdo things, and she does make them somewhat original. I particularly enjoyed Malachi’s inept but almost effective attempts on Eden’s life.

Plot-wise, the major story line was pretty good, though a little on the convoluted side. It was all set up by Eden’s adopted mother Lulu refusing to explain the whole ghost/family history thing. The episodes where Eden encountered her family’s past got more and more intense. Sometimes they were ghosts, sometimes they were real people. The final confrontation didn’t disappoint.

On the whole, while there’s a lot of small things to question, the well-done ghost story makes up for the imperfections.

Title: Four and Twenty Blackbirds
Author: Cherie Priest
Cover creator: John Jude Palencar
Series: Eden Moore; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: PDF download
Length: 285 p.
Publication date: 2008 (originally 2005 with this text)
Subject: Orphans—Fiction
Subject: Young women—Fiction
Subject: Blessing and cursing—Fiction
Subject: Racially mixed people—Fiction
Subject: Signal Mountain (Tenn.)—Fiction
Subject: Birthfathers—Fiction
Subject: Georgia— Fiction
LC classification: PS3616.R537F685 2005

After reading Midnight Robber last year, I decided to use one of my Audible.com credits to pick up Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl is Hopkinson’s debut novel, the winner of a new voice in fiction contest that publisher Warner Books held in the 90s.

While interesting, I wasn’t as enamored of this book as I was of Midnight Robber. For one, I expected science fiction. But it’s really a horror novel set in the near future using Caribbean folk religion as the base. Too much voodoo ritual and too much blood for me. Voodoo in quotes not because it’s bad or scary but because I don’t know what the name for the religious tradition is for the kinds of things Hopkinson uses. If you’re into that sort of thing, this will be a great book. I don’t mean that facetiously either. The writing was really quite good. I’m just not into religious themed horror.

Ti-Jeanne lives in near future Toronto, an ungoverned zone abandoned by the Canadian government and ringed with roadblocks to prevent the lawlessness inside from touching the still extant normal society in the rest of Ontario. Kind of like I imagine lots of people want to do to Detroit right now. Her mother left a decade prior to the story, and she lives with her grandmother Gro-Jeanne, who serves both as a medical doctor of sorts as well to the masses and as a Caribbean witch doctor to those who believe. Ti-Jeanne has newborn, not even named just yet. The father is Tony, a low-level runner for the Posse, the drug gang that controls most of Toronto. Ti-Jeanne left Tony to move back in with Gro-Jeanne because he couldn’t straighten himself out and Tony doesn’t know the child is his. She still carries a torch for him though, which is why she talks Gro-Jeanne (who doesn’t like Tony) into helping him escape from Toronto to the burbs. Outside, he’ll straighten up, find work, and send for Ti-Jeanne.

The Posse’s boss Rudy knows Tony is shiftless, but that he has some medic training. They give him a job to find a donor human heart for which the Posse will receive a generous fee from a hospital outside lawless Toronto. He doesn’t want to do this. Tony doesn’t seem so much unwilling to kill, as scared.

Here’s where the religious horror comes into play. To get Ti-Jeanne and Tony out of Toronto, Gro-Jeanne calls on the spirits to hide the two. But then it becomes apparent that Rudy himself has a Caribbean duppy (human soul) under his control. The duppy can do most anything, including track Tony. This starts an escalating war of spirits, which doesn’t end bloodlessly. Really, lots and lots of blood.

Gro-Jeanne, Ti-Jeanne and Tony are great characters. Rudy is more of a caricature, but he’s still pretty enjoyable. The Caribbean flavor to the characters is somewhat interesting as well. Surprisingly, there’s very little unique to Toronto in the story. The Posse’s headquarters is in the CN Tower, and Hopkinson makes liberal use of Toronto’s street names and neighborhoods. But the culture seems to be Caribbean focused. Then again, Toronto isn’t known (at least to me) for it’s distinctive culture.

Unlike Metatropolis, I really enjoyed the narration in Brown Girl in the Ring. Peter Jay Fernandez was the narrator for the book. He did distinct voice characterizations for everyone. Best was the women got female sounding voices, without Fernandez using weird falsettos or anything like that. I won’t shy away from anything he’s reading in the future.

Title: Brown Girl in the Ring
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Narrator: Peter Jay Fernandez
Imprint / publisher: Recorded Books
Format: Audiobook
Length:
Publication date: 1999
ISBN-13: 978-1-4361-7966-9
Subject: Inner cities — Fiction
Subject: Obeah (Cult) — Fiction
Subject: Future in popular culture — Fiction
Subject: Toronto (Ont.) — Fiction
LC classification: PR9199.3.H5927 B76 1998

Six months after starting (I skipped a month after mom died), I’ve come to the end of Stephen King’s serial novel, The Green Mile. I’m impressed, though this final chapter seemed anticlimactic. I haven’t read much Stephen King or horror, but I suspect anticlimactic is how I’ll read most horror. I expect awful things, then I close the book and nothing’s happened. The characters are just characters, and the words are just ink on pages. Despite good writing, I’m not sure I’ll ever feel lasting horror from a book.

For Coffey on the Mile, there’s little in the way of standard horror anyway. Rather than dread a what is to happen, King’s book makes an effort to relieve the reader of any dread of bad things. The characters, particularly Paul Edgecombe, have to face a sin they are about to commit, but it’s dread of a different kind. The victim provides absolution in advance. That may not be much solace for a real person in the situation, but I think it removes most of the horror that a reader would anticipate.

I liked the book. I liked the serialization. And strangely, or not so strangely, that’s all I have to say.

Title: The Green Mile: Part 6: Coffey on the Mile
Author: Stephen King
Series: The Green Mile; 6
Imprint / publisher: Signet / Penguin
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 138 p.
Publication date: August 1996
ISBN-10: 0-451-19057-2

I thought I would take a break from the slow reading of Ričardas Gavelis’ Vilnius Poker. It’s decent, but it’s dense and thus taking me a while.

So today I went up to Remedy Teas to read the penultimate installment in the Green Mile serialization Night Journey. Now’s the time for those who don’t want to book to be spoiled to click away.

Up until now, Paul Edgecombe, the head guard for the death row wing of Cold Mountain Penitentiary, has realized the John Coffey, the big dumb black inmate, has the ability to heal illness. The reader has also been introduced to the asshole guard Percy Wetmore and a couple of inmate (William Wharton, Eduard Delacroix) as well as a few of the other guards. Last installment, Wetmore took revenge on Delacroix by making his execution exceedingly painful. That was somewhat of a catalyst for an idea that Edgecombe had which is to be carried out in part five. He wants Coffey to heal the Melinda, the wife of his friend and warden of the prison, who has been stricken with brain cancer.

In order to do that, either Melinda needs to come to the prison or Coffey needs to go to her. Since she’s extremely ill, it must be the latter. With the assistance of all the guards except Wetmore, they sneak Coffey out to visit the warden’s wife. There’s not a lot of character development this time, except we see the kinds of hearts that the guards have. They all help. This book is the plot-driven build up to the end of the saga. Will they pull off the caper without being discovered? A lot of do something, encounter problem, solve problem, move to next step in the plot. And then, King leaves the reader with a cliffhanger as the caper ends.

Liked it.

Title: The Green Mile: Part Five: Night Journey
Author: Stephen King
Series: The Green Mile; 5
Imprint / publisher: Signet / Penguin
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 90 p.
Publication date: July 1996
ISBN-10: 0-451-19056-4

I really like part four of The Green Mile. Not for any of the supernatural aspects, nor even the goings-on at Cold Mountain Penitentiary. Nah, what I really liked about The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix was the very first chapter.

At the beginning of the installment, an old Paul Edgecombe writes about writing while staying at the Georgia Pines old folks home. From the aside about his kids forcing him to move there, to the tenderness his ladyfriend extends toward him as he actually sits down to write of his part in John Coffey’s story. In between Edgecombe has an encounter with a particularly perverse orderly, one who works the job because he likes to lord it over the old and feeble. Much like Percy Wetmore, the sadistic pain-in-the-ass guard on the Green Mile. That first chapter has so much more real feeling emotion than the shock, horror, and anger later in the book when Eduard Delacroix’s execution doesn’t go according to plan.

That later part isn’t bad, but it is merely part of the growing escalation of what happens with John Coffey and (perhaps) Percy Wetmore in the last two of the serials. It raised the level of anticipation for them quite well, but in and of itself, I had a hard time feeling much horror or disgust.

Title: The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix
Author: Stephen King
Cover creator: Robert Hunt
Series: The Green Mile; 4
Imprint / publisher: Signet / Penguin
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 90 p.
Publication date: June 1996
ISBN-10: 0-451-19055-6