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.