Wisdom for All Ages

Ursula K. Le Guin turned 88 a few weeks before her latest book was published. Her new book is No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters.  It is basically a collection of some of her blog posts since she started blogging in 2010. That makes the book sound less interesting than it actually is. Le Guin has accumulated much wisdom in her nearly nine decades on the planet.  And her viewpoint is always worth reading and reflecting upon. (Well, almost.  When authors write about their own pets the result is often dire.  With Le Guin, it's cats. And there are seven entries on her cat. I'm sure some people will find them charming.  I didn't.) 

Much of Le Guin's thoughts on fantasy, escapism, imagination, fundamentalism should be read by everyone (especially those people who don't sympathize with these subjects).  Her views on Darwin and belief are quite clearly thought out and reasonable. She writes: "I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.  I accept it.  It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence. The whole undertaking of science us to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis,  to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief."  Amen to that.

Le Guin is a national treasure.  May she ruminate and continue to write for years to come.  (But hold back on too many cat posts.) 

YA Tales of Unnatural Death

John Gordon's short collection, The Burning Baby and Other Ghosts (1992), contains five tales of various ghosts and unnatural deaths. The title story is the best in the book, about a glowing baby that appears in the bonfire that secretly hold the corpse of a murdered pregnant girl. The second story, "Under the Ice," is about a dead body sometimes seen under the ice where some young boys go skating. The remaining three tales get silly—"The Eels" about a haunting be eels after an old woman's grand-daughter is killed.  "The Key" and "Death Wish" are overly complicated and not very rewarding. The vibrancy of the first tale sets a standard unrivaled by any other tale in the book. 

Silly Ghost Stories

The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories (2016) is the latest collection of ghost stories by Susan Hill, known for her novella The Woman in Black (1983) which has been filmed twice. The new volumes contains only four stories, all of them silly in some way.  In the title story, the prank of filling a travelling bag with moths ends up with a man dead. In "Alice Baker" an office worker always has bad smells around her and she doesn't make friends with her co-workers.  Eventually, the narrator figures out she was a ghost. In "The Front Room" a Christian family, feeling charitable, move the husband's unpleasant elderly step-mother into their front room, with predictable awfulness.  "Boy Number 21" concerns a very lonely schoolboy whose one friend goes missing, yet apparently he reappears from time to time. All four stories feel unpolished--with incongruous ideas tossed off to keep the plot moving without regard to the story structure itself. A sad, disappointing little volume.

Dinosaur Tales

Dinosaur Tales (1983) by Ray Bradbury is a slim collection of four short stories, and two poems, overly illustrated by various talented artists with the shackles of black-and-white-only put upon their imaginations. There is a short foreword by Ray Harryhausen, and gung-ho introduction by Bradbury himself, but the end-result is really a fourth-rate product.  Only one of the stories is really good (the class "A Sound of Thunder" from 1951, which has been filmed a couple of times), the rest of the book is the kind of stuff one expects from a book packager who thinks:  "Ray Bradbury wrote a great dinosaur tale and a few other crappy ones, and one that isn't really a dinosaur tale but we can call it one. Let's bring them together with some black-and-white illustrations, and a color cover, that we can get for cheap and make a book of it."  And that's exactly what Byron Preiss Visual Publications Inc. did. The end-result only diminishes the reputations of everyone involved.  

The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories: Eight Ghosts

English Heritage is a registered charity that cares for over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places in England. The idea behind this book was to invite eight writers to be allowed after hours access at their chosen English Heritage site, in order to write a ghost story about that site.  Proceeds from the book will go so support conservation of English Heritage sites. So far, so good.

In practice the resulting stories are of mixed quality. "The Bunker" by Mark Haddon seems more like the set-up for a time-slip novel. It grabs your interest, but simply ends too soon. "As Strong as Death" by Jeanette Winterson bring a modern style to a ghost story at a same-sex wedding.  The opening story, "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me See"by Sarah Perry, is about a haunting attached to an intricately carved wooden screen in a large hall. "Mr. Lanyard's Last Case" by Andrew Michael Hurley is the story of a mid-eighteenth century prosecutor's last case. Stuart Evers's "Never Departed More" is a diffuse tale of an actress scouting out the locale of planned film; she becomes too involved with the ghosts. Kate Clanchy's "The Wall" tries some structural trickery which makes her story less satisfying, while Kamila Shamsie's "Foreboding" is groanworthy as it has a Middle-eastern or East Asian man in England experiencing a bad pun telepathically via his sister as she dies thousands of miles away. Max Porter's "Mrs. Charbury at Eltham" is the best story in the book, skillfully juxtaposing two parallel narratives, one from the 1930s and the other from modern times, into one connected haunting.  Andrew Martin adds an afterword, "Within These Walls," a rumination on the development of the ghost story, and there is an anonymous 39-page closing essay,  "A Gazetteer of English Heritage Hauntings," presumably by Rowan Routh, who is credited with editing this volume.

Whispers in the Dark

Whispers in the Dark (1992) is the second of Jonathan Aycliffe's supernatural thrillers.  It is basically a memoir of the girlhood of Charlotte Metcalf, written in her old age, and telling of the awful events of her childhood, including the supernatural curse on her family based around the hall of her cousins, Antonia and Anthony Ayrton. It is very smoothly written, engaging and readable, even if one wishes for something more substantial. Yet it remains at best only a well-done commercial thriller. 

The Falling Woman

The Falling Woman (1986) by Pat Murphy is another one of the Nebula Award winners that I didn't read when it first came out.  It's an odd choice for a supposed "best science fiction" novel, for it is basically a mystical fantasy. (And later editions of the book add a subtitle that wasn't there initially, "A Fantasy.") But leaving all that aside, the book is basically the story of two women, Elizabeth Butler, an archeologist at a site in the Yucatan, and her estranged daughter Diane who seeks out her mother after a fifteen year absence following some upheavals in her own life, including the death of the father who raised her.  Elizabeth, who has a history of mental issues, sees ghosts from the past, and in the field of archeology, this appears as a bonus for her understanding of her work.  Diane decides to stay with the dig, and she too experiences these ghosts, including the ghost of a survivor of human sacrifice, the only survivor of the live offerings cast into a deep pool.  The characters are finely drawn, and their interplay passes for plot in most of the book. It is well-done, and engaging in a relative way, but I remain surprised that this novel is the winner of a major award. 

The Kin of Ata ...

In 1971, The Comforter: A Mystical Tale was published by its author, D.M. Bryant. It tells the story of an arrogant and  unlikeable man who chokes his girlfriend to death and flees in a car, afterwards having a serious automobile accident.  The man wakes up in an island world rather like an idyllic California commune, with a self-sufficient but small batch of dreamers who seem to do almost nothing, which of course irritates the man.  So when wanting sex, he rapes one woman who had befriended him, and over the course of the rest of the book he learns their language and their ways, spending decades with this kin of Ata. The woman he raped becomes his lover and comforter, until she leaves (by metaphysical recourse) to come to this world to help make it better.  This desertion crushes the man, and eventually he decides to follow her back to this world, and he returns to find himself in a hospital, shortly after his automobile accident, and he is soon charged with the murder of his girlfriend. Thus the decades with the Ata were a dream vision. Or perhaps not.  The man realizes that he must plead guilty to the murder, because it is the right thing to do.  He writes the book The Comforter in order to explain himself, before he is executed and thereby can return to Ata.

This book is far better-known under the later title The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, which was used when it was first reprinted in 1976. The author was then signed "Dorothy Bryant."  One wonders whether the gender neutral initials it was first published under were to  mask the author as a female.  Yet the book itself is decidedly feminine in approach and attitudes, if once considers it a product of its era, that being California in the late 1960s.  As a novel it is mildly interesting, but nothing more. I don't understand why is has earned the status of cult classic.

Endymion Spring

Endymion Spring (2006) is a curious first novel by Matthew Skelton. It operates on two related time-lines, one of a young boy Endymion Spring who is apprenticed to Johann Gutenberg in Mainz in the fifteenth century, as Gutenberg was developing moveable type. The other follows a young modern American boy Blake Winters, who is at Oxford with his younger sister and mother, who is a scholar studying at the Bodleian and other libraries. What connects the stories is a old book, blank to everyone but Blake, who sees various riddles and statements on its pages. What sounds like a promising start of an oddball biblio-mystery gets lost in its own development. This old book is evidently both powerful and magical, and it is purported to be able to lead its bearer to a Last Book, which contains all the wisdom of the world. Of course the various Oxford bibliophiles and scholars Blake encounters all know of this, and want the book for their own purposes. But this set-up is unconvincing and contrived, for the book itself is aware enough to guide Blake, and its pages conveniently glow with light when the plot needs it to. And this contrived nature makes the book much less interesting than it might have been. Still, it is readable, if not particularly well-written, and it is different enough from the popular  run-of-the-mill fantasies that it keeps one's interest. Overall, though, one can't help thinking that it should have been better.

Release? From What?

I encountered the name of Patrick Ness first because he wrote the screenplay of A Monster Calls, based on his own novel of the same name.  An interesting if rather tepid film. Next I saw a few episodes of the dull BBC Dr. Who spinoff, Class, which was deservedly cancelled after one season. Now comes a new novel, Released, which has got some very positive attention. Alas, I wish the acclaim was deserved. Released is primarily the story of one pivotal day in the life of a gay teen in Washington state, the son of a clergyman in a very repressive religious family. Adam Thorn moons about his ex-boyfriend, whose family is moving away, while not appreciating enough his current boyfriend. On this day he learns that his closest friend, Angela, will be going to Denmark for senior year, and on top of this his seedy boss Wade threatens Adam that he will lose his job if he doesn't have sex with him, etc. Alongside this trite narrative is a shadow story about a murdered girl who comes back to confront the boy who killed her. All of this is dull and contrived. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.   

Erotic Tales of Werewolves?

In the "Editor’s Note" to this short collection of four stories (originally published in 1994), Cecilia Tan says that when she announced that she was editing two anthologies of erotic fiction, one on vampires the other on werewolves, the common response was “Well, I can understand vampires, but why werewolves?”  Why indeed.

In the first story, “The Spirit That Denies” by Jay Michaelson, a male werewolf (in wolf form) has sex with a human female, after both feed on their kill of a deer. In the second story, “The Killing of the Calf” by Linda Hooper, a human female has sex with a female werewolf (in wolf form), just before their pack goes on a hunt. The third story, “Alma Mater” by Robert M. Schroek, a man lost in an Italian snowstorm is saved by a young woman, who changes into a wolf during their subsequent sex. There is an historical reveal in the final sentence that is pointless and dull. Finally, the last story, “Wilderland” by Reina Delacroix, at least tries to be something more than a mere sex scene. In it a young woman in Seattle spends time in a VR program called Wilderland in which she is a wolf, dreaming and masturbating, until she encounters a sympathetic associate in both the VR and real worlds. 

Unless you have an interest in sex between humans and animals (in this case wolves), there is really no point to reading this collection. At its core, this booklet is just boring.

Thrillers 2

Thrillers 2 (2007) is a collection of nine stories, with author notes, by four authors, edited by Robert Morrish. It is a sequel in kind to a previous volume Thrillers (1993), edited by Richard Chizmar. 

It is usual practice for an anthologist to open a book with a very strong first story. This is not the case here. "Pen Umbra," a novella by Gemma Files, is an inchoate mess, often clumsily written to the point of readerly distraction. It contains a few interesting ideas, but they are squandered in this mostly uninteresting tale. One comes to the clean prose of Tim Waggoner with a sense of relief. Waggoner is represented with three stories, the first two of which are straightforward, beginning with almost trite situations that are quickly altered by very unusual and weird plot developments. Waggoner's third tale, "Darker than Winter," is far less interesting. R. Patrick Gates contributed three tales which attempt to mix humor in with horror.  The results are not very good, particularly the bizarre "The Tell-Tale Nose" in which a man's nose comes to life, and gains a voice which then ruins the man's life. This reads like the bad result of a writing-course exercise. Finally, there are two tales by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and they are the outstanding stories in this book.  "The Daughter of the Four Tentacles" is somewhat slow to come together, while "Houses Under the Sea" is an excellent modern Lovecraftian tale, of the cult-worship of an odd undersea creature. Overall a disappointing anthology, with only a few bright spots.

August Derleth's fan-fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) by August Derleth contains six longish stories which are hard to categorize, beyond the obvious remark of their obvious indebtedness to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.  The earliest story (in terms of composition), "The Return of Hastur," was seen in some form by Lovecraft himself before he died in 1937.  Derleth remarks in his brief introduction that Lovecraft saw the "opening pages and the outline of my proposed development" and made several suggestions that were adopted "enthusiastically" by Derleth.  Yet Derleth has taken Lovecraftian themes and nomenclatures, and extended and regularized them, so much so that the vein of Lovecraft is impure and even debased.  With the latter term I refer to Derleth's adding a sort-of Christian good-vs-evil orthodoxy to Lovecraft's invented pantheon of Elder Gods, all of which diminishes Derleth's stories and makes them so less satisfying than Lovecraft's originals. What Derleth has really done is to write a form of fan-fiction, ticking off certain ideas and invented lore that (Derleth thinks) will thrill the Lovecraft fans who recognize them.  Alas, that's a very low bar, and the resultant stories read like poor pastiches of Lovecraft's originals.

From Ancient Ravens

From Ancient Ravens is the third and final collection of three novellas by three authors, Mark Valentine, John Howard, and Ron Weighell, published as a series by Sarob Press.  I've reviewed the first two volumes previously, Romances of the White Day, and Pagan Triptych.  Here the common inspiration is a quote from Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucretia":

To pluck the quills from ancient ravens' wings . . .And turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel.

The first story is "The Fifth Moon" by Mark Valentine.  It is also the most Shakespearean in tone and content, and it concerns the legends of the supposed treasure lost by King John in the early thirteenth-century. It is also the standout story in the book.  Ron Weighell's "The Asmodeus Fellowship" is second, and rather disappointing.  Weighell often plays with esoteric and occult lore, but this story contains way too much of such imagined stories and volumes, so much so that the result gets boring. The tone is also rather rococo too. Parts of the story are fascinating and brilliant, but as a whole it doesn't work well.  John Howard's closing tale, "Between Me and the Sun," begins as a deceptively simple tale of the sexually-charged friendship of three teenage boys, turning into the meditation of middle-aged men on their lost friendship. I'm not sure Howard tied up all the loose ends (a re-read might make this clearer), but it still makes for a worthy and readable story.

Atlantis!

The Lost Continent by C.J. Cutliffe Hyne is reputed to be the best rendering of the Atlantis myth into novel form. It was originally serialized in Pearson's Magazine in 1899, and appeared in book form the following year.  It tells the story of Deucalion, the priestly leader of the Atlantian colony in Yucatan, returning home after twenty years, where he is courted by the upstart empress Phorenice, herself guilty of many sins against the old codes of Atlantis, including self-deification. The story has several unfortunate tropes of popular adventure fiction of its time, including the quick love from the lifelong bachelor Deucalion for a rebel woman he encounters only briefly, which provides (supposed) motivation for several of his subsequent actions. Still, the book remains a good example of its type and era. Basically The Lost Continent belongs on the shelf next to the novels of H. Rider Haggard.  While it was directly inspired by the Victorian pseudoscience Atlantis: The Antidiluvian World (1882) by Ignatius Donnelly, it in turn inspired some of the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

An Unimpressive Medley

Like its two predecessors (each reviewed previously), A Fantasy Medley 3 (2015), edited by Yanni Kuznia, contains modern fantasy tales by four authors. This volume has two authors new to me (Kevin Hearne and Laura Bickle), and two whose names are familiar to me, though I'd never read their works before (Aliette de Bodard and Jacqueline Carey). All four stories are run of the mill, though if I had to pick one that was slightly better I'd pick the Carey. None of them are horrible, though their styles are similar and not especially memorable. As examples of world-building (each story relates in some way to its authors other writings), none of them stand out. If any of the tales were intended to tempt me to read more by its author, they didn't succeed. Rather all four are typical examples of the dreary quirky shape that modern fantasy has taken in the last few decades.
 

Dreamsnake

Occasionally I pick up a Nebula Award-winning novel that for some reason I've never read. Often it's a kind of offtrail winner.  This time it was Dreamsnake (1978) by Vonda N. McIntyre.  It won the Nebula Award in 1979.  The first chapter of the book had also won a Nebula Award for novelette after it appeared in the October 1973 issue of Analog.

Basically, the novel tells the story of an itinerant healer called Snake, who has been trained to use snakes, three kinds in particular, to heal people. One of the snakes is the rare dreamsnake, a remnant of alien contact many years in the past.  After her dreamsnake is killed by ignorant desert people, Snake hopes to find a way to get another dreamsnake and in the meanwhile comes upon the the truth about the alien dreamsnakes.

This is an engaging story, a serious and compassionate tale that might have slipped under the radar of history had it not received a Nebula. There are many aspects in the world-building of this tale that work well, but there are also a few that are puzzling, like the young man Gabriel, who has been shamed publicly for his inability to self-regulate his own fertility, the details of which (socially and conceptually) are left too murky. Still, despite a few flaws, this is a worthwhile read.

William Seabrook and the Abominable Joe Ullmann

William Seabrook (1884-1945) was a tabloid writer who also wrote tabloid-styled books, about voodoo, witchcraft, and being in an asylum. During the 1930s he was a popular figure, and he had friendships with many people ranging from Aleister Crowley to Gertrude Stein. Joe Ollmann is comics illustrator who has written and illustrated a book titled The Abominable Mr. Seabrook.  The artwork is grubby and unpleasant (even a blurb on this book notes that Ollmann "draws with a gnarly, blunt line and his characters have a misshapen, antagonistic appearance"); the story is grossly simplified in ways (the mantra in the first part is to describe Seabrook repeatedly as "writer, explorer, alcoholic, sadist, cannibal").  It all leads up to a laughable armchair denouement that describes Seabrook's peculiarities as being the result of having an unusually large sex organ, and Ollmann trumpets in his notes that "I have never seen this fact published anywhere else in anything I've read about Seabrook." Searbook deserves much better than this kind of crap treatment.

Learning Not to Be Invisible

Christopher Barzak's Wonders of the Invisible World seems like three different books rolled into one. It starts as a coming-of-age / coming-out story of an Ohio teenager named Adrian Lockwood. About a third of the way into it it becomes a more mythic tale of the world unseen by most people—a world previously blocked to Adrian by his mother, and finally it becomes a kind of family story and generational saga, helping Adrian learn where he fits in in this world.  It's well done for what it is, and well-written, even if one wishes there were more to it than there is.

Boys Aren't Wanted Here

First of all, Every Heart a Doorway is a YA book being published as an adult one.  But that doesn't really bother me.  It has a promising premise--that misunderstood children have often visited other worlds, and they have problems adjusting when they come back to this world.  Enter Miss Eleanor West, who runs home for wayward children, and who recruits specifically those children whom she recognizes as having visited  other worlds.  But according to the author, such children are "overwhelmingly" girls, and here begins the unfortunate PC thread that spoils this book completely.  The main character, Nancy, quickly labels herself asexual, and the first boy she meets, Kade, turns out of be trans (formerly a girl).  And we get occasional comment about gender dystopia and even sex with corpses ("corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators").  The problem with all this is that it is just politically correct window-dressing. It's as objectionable here as when done from the opposite politically-incorrect perspective.  The problem is, basically, that none of this has any depth with regard to the story, and it all sticks out like the extraneous propaganda that it is.  The reason given that so few boys are to be found at the school is breezily dismissive, cliched and stereotypical: "They're too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds."  This anti-male attitude runs throughout the book. I don't want to read anything else by this author.

In the Tradition of ... Lovecraft, Blackwood

Agents of Dreamlands is a new Lovecraftian novella by Caitlin R. Kiernan.  The storyline itself is interesting, but the prose is filled with Kiernan's usual blemishes—a large number of cliches, an overuse of pop-culture references, and an overall attitude or authorial persona that feels deeply phoney. And as usual the story progresses far before much context is given to the reader.  I think it very wrong that one needs to read the back-cover blurb so as to gain the basic idea of what the story itself is doing.  But that's the case.  Read the back-cover blurb.  It sounds very interesting, but you won't get most of this until you're past the half-way point of the story.

Pagan Triptych is the second of three volumes containing novellas (with afterwords) by three British writers, Ron Weighell, John Howard, and Mark Valentine.  This volume is supposed to contains stories in the tradition of Algernon Blackwood, but the definition of "in the tradition of" is rather slippery.  Ron Weighell's story is sort of in the occult detective tradition of Blackwood's John Silence.  John Howard's has to do with nature mysticism and a Londoner going native in the suburbs.  And Mark Valentine's is a shorter piece about how rituals work in our lives whether we see them as such or not.  All three stories are worth reading, but none are standouts. 

Old Things and a Beautiful Thing

Romances of the White Day (2015) is the first of three small press volumes by the same three authors, each contributing a novella and a short essay about their contribution.  The authors are John Howard, Mark Valentine, and Ron Weighell.  The publisher is Sarob Press.  This volume is a tribute to the writings of Arthur Machen, and each story involves some Machenian aspect.  John Howard's concerns some London adventures by three men, decades apart.  The gem of the book is the story by Mark Valentine, which concerns the enactment of an ancient ritual in modern Wales.  Ron Weighell's concluding story reveals the secrets behind a lost decadent illustrator and a portal to another dimension.  Each story is well-done and engaging.

I watched the film Beautiful Thing (1996) a few decades ago, and if I knew then that it was based on a 1993 play by Jonathan Harvey, I had long forgotten it.  I thought the film rather good, but had had problems with understanding the dialogue at times because of the heavy (South East?) London accents.  So when I stumbled on the play, I thought,  Good, here's a chance to read it in the original form.  Well, perhaps that's not the best thing to have done. I probably should have instead seen a production of the play.  From what I recall, the play isn't much different from the film, but the film feels much less claustrophobic. Still, Beautiful Thing is worth experiencing in any form.*

*Well, after writing the above I learned that there was an edition of the screenplay itself that had been published (cover below) to coincide with the film, and I got a copy and read it.  That's just what I needed, in lieu of English subtitles lacking from the DVD.  Now I can understand the extra witticisms I was missing. 

Reggie Oliver tries Edward Gorey-lite

Reggie Oliver has published a number of remarkably good collections of weird short fiction since  2003, some volumes of which have his own illustrations. In 2016, he tried something in a new vein, an oversize heavily-illustrated tale in verse, The Hauntings at Tankerton Park.  It was first published in a hardcover limited edition at a high price, but it has now appeared in a paperback edition, also at a high price for what it is (around $45 for some 52 pages).

The story is basically about the Clark family who move into  Tankerton Park in early 1890, where they experience a sequence of hauntings in alphabetical order.  The first half of the book has one line of verse (with an illustrated letter), facing a full page illustration, done in considerable detail.  The the lines for the odd and even letters rhyme, thus:

S was a Skeleton which wandered the grounds;
T was the Teapot emitting odd sounds. 

In the second part of the book, there is a second alphabet describing how the Clark family has gotten rid of each haunting. Here each letter, in addition to the illustrated letter and the full page illustration, has a rhyming couplet:

S was the Saucer that smashed on the skull
Of the Skeleton errant to make it more dull.

T was the Twine that they twisted around
The tormented Teapot to strangle its sound. 

At the end of the story, and despite their successes in getting rid of the hauntings, the Clark family moves away. 

One can't help but compare such illustrated tales done with rhyming alphabets with the works of Edward Gorey.  Reggie Oliver has tried something slightly different, but the result lacks Gorey's uncanny ability to project a story in such a small number of words, and Oliver's style lacks the delightful wickedness of Gorey as well.  It's not that Reggie Oliver's attempt is in any way bad, it just doesn't stand up to Edward Gorey's clear masterdom.

Literary Spousal Abuse

Irish Murdoch published twenty-six novels and a number of other books, including plays and books on philosophy.  She won (among other distinguished awards) the Booker Prize for her novel The Sea, the Sea (1978). She was careful of her public image, and the the integrity of her novels speak for themselves. She died in 1999 at the age of 79, but her final few years passed in the cloud of Alzheimer's disease.  Her husband, John Bayley, wrote and published the year before her death a memoir of her slide into dementia. It was filmed a few years later as Iris. It is a depressing and sad book, not so much for the picture it paints of Murdoch and her decline, but for the mere act of its existence, a complete betrayal of her integrity by her husband.  Now instead of being remembered for the high standards of her literary work, she is remembered as the demented old lady portrayed by Judi Dench in the film based on her husband's literary spousal abuse. Sadly, the book was a bestseller. 

The Crapper in the Rye

When I first read The Catcher in the Rye, around the age of twenty, I thought it was terrible. Reading it again years later, I find I was too kind in my youth. The idea that this insipid stream-of-conscious first person narrative of a sixteen year-old moron is a classic completely befuddles me. I find no merit in the book whatsoever.  It is the perfect example of "phony" that Holden Caulfield whines about for over two hundred pages.  Do yourself a favor and skip this book.  For me, I shall never read another word written by the hack J.D. Salinger ever again. This book now tops two personal lists:  1) Most Overrated Book Ever; and 2) Worst Book Ever Published.

Wicked Angels? Not really

Wicked Angels is an English translation of the 1955 French novel Les mauvais anges by Eric Jourdan.  It was banned for thirty years in France, presumably because of its subject matter. It tells the love story of two seventeen year old boys.  Oddly, the novel avoids describing the sex between the boys and opts instead for a coy allusiveness and lyricism. This turns unpleasant as the boys take to inflicting pain upon each other as signs of their love. The escalation of this sadism leads on to the death of one boy and the suicide of the other. The short novel is divided into two parts, the first told by Pierre, and the second told by Gerard. Though it is marketed as a lost classic, it is not one. It is frankly boring, and the cliched ending (where same-sex lovers end up dead) is (fortunately) a thing of the past. 

The Green Children

I happened upon an interesting reference to this book by Kevin Crossley-Holland, so I secured a copy.  Early in his career, Crossley-Holland published a number of reworkings of early Germanic literature, from Beowulf and King Horn to Havelok the Dane. Most of them are the size of short novels, whereas The Green Children (1966) is basically a short story, published as a picture book, illustrated by Margaret Gordon. 

The origin of Crossley-Holland's version of The Green Children is found in two accounts of a twelfth century happening in Suffolk in East Anglia. One day two green children are found by peasants and brought to the local lord.  They can't speak English and are hungry but won't eat anything offered to them until they see some freshly cut beans. The beans satisfy their hunger, but over time the boy gradually withers away and dies.  The girl learns English and begins to eat normally, so that her green coloring diminishes.She notes that she and her brother came from an underground realm, and got lost in caves before emerging in the sunshine in a world new to them.

That's pretty much the whole tale in a nutshell.  I liked the story, but thought less of the illustrations.