Dancing with Salome by Nina Antonia

With Dancing with Salome: Courting the Uncanny with Oscar Wilde and Friends (2021) by Nina Antonia, one should ignore the main title (referencing Wilde's macabre play) and cue into the subtitle for the descriptive phrase that tells the reader what this book is about, and why one should want to read it. The small book consists of four essays, plus an introduction by Therese Taylor and a shorter introduction by the author. The first essay covers the supernatural thread in Oscar Wilde's life, while the second discusses "the supernatural affair of Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde."  The third explicates Aleister Crowley's unsuccessful attempts to goad Douglas into a lawsuit, and the final one is on the life of Lionel Johnson, the friend of Douglas who introduced him to Wilde, who was also the subject of a previous volume by Antonia, Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era's Dark Angel (2018). Dancing with Salome is an intriguing look at the occult aspects of Wilde and of his friends in the 1890s, a subject usually given short shrift in books for more general audiences.  I found it well-written and illuminating. 

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

Starship Troopers (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein is another of those supposedly-classic science fiction novels I had never read, until now.  But I did see the 1997 movie, which was enough to make me think I wouldn't like the book. I was right, but not for the reasons I thought. The book isn't really an adventure story, but a history of the military indoctrination of a young man in the future. It's filled with info-dumps giving arguments about service and citizenship, all of which (if followed) would likely lead directly to fascism. The movie jettisoned all this, taking a snarky tone, and concentrating on the war with the completely inhuman aliens called merely Bugs. It probably was the right choice for making an almost palatable film, but reading the book makes one feel that Heinlein's views of society are as diabolically twisted as Ayn Rand's objectivism (a candy-coated term for selfishness). Why either book is popular is beyond me, but they are book ends on the same bookshelf. Not a shelf I want in my bookcases. 

The Director Should've Shot You by Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster has been a prolific author of original books as well as of novelizations of scripts. This book, The Director Should Have Shot You (2021),  concerns the latter, covering some twenty-seven projects from 1974 through 2017, many of them very high-profile franchises (e.g., Star Trek, Star Wars, Terminator, Alien, etc.). I'd previously understood that writers were the lowest person on the totem pole in Hollywood, but Foster's book makes abundantly clear that those writers who novelize scripts are the lowest of the low. Clearly I didn't have a cynical enough view of Hollywood before I read this book. Here's are some choice observations:

"Most of the folks working on large-scale films understand that they cannot set the lights, cannot build the sets, cannot do the special effects or sew the costumes or produce or direct or act or wrangle the dogs--but everybody thinks they can write." (p. 184)

"Nothing will get you eyed with greater suspicion in Hollywood than offering to do something for free." (p. 103)

"Given enough CGI action, a certain segment of the movie-going public will watch anything, no matter how little sense is made by the plot, characters, and dialogue." (p. 229)

"Of course, logic and reason never stopped a movie from getting made, so we continue to be threatened with an endless succession of mind-numbing Terminator films. Maybe that is the machines' real method of exterminating us: dulling out thought processes with increasingly stupid movies to the point where we are unable to mount an intelligent resistance." (p. 218)

First Impressions by Glen Engel-Cox

I've read book reviews by Glen Engel-Cox for a long time, as I find him an interesting critic who expresses himself quite nicely, and one with whom I share a fair number of author-interests. Now comes a supersized (500 oversized pages) collection a lot of the reviews, titled First Impressions (2021). The book's subtitle notes he has been "Dancing about Literature since 1986," though the bulk of the reviews date from the decade of the 1990s, after which the number of books reviewed drops considerably. 

Reading (or rereading) reviews of favorite authors do bring insights, and recommendations for other books I haven't read. Besides masters like Borges and John Crowley, Engel-Cox has a taste for quirky modern fantasists like Jonathan Carroll, Graham Joyce, William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers, James Morrow, and many others. But his praise is not unconditional, and flaws are pointed out and discussed. And Engel-Cox does single out books that he expected to like more but in the end found disappointing. I certainly agree with him on Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint,  Edward Whittemore's Sinai Tapestry and even the supposed classic anthology, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison.  

Of course the real value of this book is in the descriptions of books I haven't read that the reviewer found especially worthwhile. So I'm making yet another list of books to read, or to acquire (if I don't already have them). And I look forward to some worthwhile reading. I do hope Engel-Cox will do a follow-up volume, covering more thoroughly the speculative fiction of the 2010s. I wonder if he feels the heavy disappointment I have found in a great many of the supposed standout books of the modern era.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Another ho-hum short modern fantasy that seems designed to tick off various qualities of virtue-signalling. Asian-styled setting. Check.  Character who uses the (annoying) ungrammatical single they/their pronouns.  Check. The publisher's blurb on the rear calls the book "feminist high fantasy" (debatable, on both points) and "an indictment of monarchy" (ditto). Etc. What's left? A thin story of an empress's revenge, played out over years.  The blurbs on the rear by other writers are delusional: "An elegant gut punch" Seanan McGuire; "a small, masterful jewel" Aliette de Bodard; "Glorious, beautifully written"  Kate Elliott.  The book is not dreadful; it's just not very good.

Wally the Wordworm by Clifton Fadiman

A slim children's book by the well-known bookman Clifton Fadiman, first published in 1964. Fadiman wrote it because he hated children's books that limited their vocabulary to words supposedly suitable for children. He found words fun--they opened up new worlds, new meanings, and new feelings, things which should be encouraged in children. Thus the tale of Wally the Wordworm, an explorer who eats his way through odd words in a dictionary. It's a clever and amusing contrast to the many modern books of a less ambitious nature. 

Web by John Wyndham

John Wyndham is one of those authors that I would expect to like but don't. British and dour, hopeful and initially optimistic, are qualities in the right direction, but a classic like The Day of the Triffids left me cold. The reason?  Because Wyndham underplayed the interesting overarching plot and centered on a small boring group of survivalists. I've been tempted for years to read his final novel, Web, which went unpublished until a decade after his death in 1969. In the mid-1960s he had tried to get a co-author for it, but when he would explain that it was about "giant spiders" it turned off potential collaborators like Brian Aldiss. I started the novel but saw Wyndham's typical dullnesses quickly begin to emerge. Instead of abandoning it completely, I found another option. In 1991 it was retold by Jocelyn Potter and Andy Hopkins in a much truncated version designed for "upper intermediate" young readers. Thus in about fifty small pages I could get the plot and feeling of the novel of some 180+ pages, with much less suffering.  I'm glad I did this, for it satisfied my curiosity about the book in one sitting and I didn't have to slog through extended passages of Wyndham's weaknesses. In this small form it's kind of like a Twilight Zone episode--dated, with dull characters on a serious mission, who encounter malevolent spiders on a remote south seas isle, and with the expected stinger in the tail. Good for a short entertainment, but not for anything more.

The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

I recently saw two films that were co-written and co-directed by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley:  Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015) and  Permanent Green Light (2018), and I realized that I've never read anything by Cooper, who is primarily known as a fiction writer. So I looked around a bit, and thought I'd try The Sluts (2004). After reading the book, I was surprised by how accurate the blurb on the rear cover is as regards the set-up of the book: "Set largely on the pages of a Web site where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, e-mails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth." What this doesn't hint at is how violent much of the book is. S&M is mild compared to the extended discussions of snuff films and the extreme torture played out on the supposedly willing underage street prostitutes. The book is basically torture-porn, with a bit of a plot. Neither the subject matter nor the technique of this book interests me, so I think I'm done with Dennis Cooper.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Every year or so I feel I ought to try some new poet, and this year I decided to try the slim "first full-length collection" by Ocean Vuong, with the intriguing title Night Sky with Exit Wounds. It came out in 2016, and my copy is an undated fourth printing, so it's evidently been successful, as far as poetry goes. But sadly the book's best moment is the title itself. The rest is drivel, all moments and thoughts very personal to the author, but of little interest for anyone else. So, thirty-five poems spaciously spread over eighty-five pages in a slim book, and it really was a waste of time. A perfect exemplar of why the audience for modern poetry gets smaller and smaller.

Prosper's Demon by K.J. Parker

Prosper's Demon is a novella by K.J. Parker, a pseudonym of Tom Holt. It is the tale of a mortal exorcist fighting possessions by immortal demons, in a quasi-medieval setting. The exorcist discovers that the famous self-proclaimed scientific genius, Prosper of Schanz, is possessed by a demon, and the exorcist begins a forbidden collaboration with the demon, seeming to aid the demon's long-term plans because they will outlast the exorcist. The dual between the two is clever, but the story is only moderately successful, and the ending is rather rushed. Prosper's Demon is  darker in ways than the other books by Tom Holt that I've read.

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

Witchmark is the tale of Dr. Miles Singer, secretly a witch who uses his forbidden powers clandestinely to heal people. It is set in an other world modeled after Edwardian England, where there is a great war ongoing between Aeland and Laneer, and the otherworldly beings called Amaranthines have sent a representative to Aeland to figure out what is happening to all the souls of the dying. Dr. Miles Singer was originally Sir Christopher Miles Hensley, part of the (hidden) elite who manage Aeland, who turned his back upon his family (including his sister, to whom he was supposed to be attached as a secondary magical power) and his position in society in order to serve in the war and become a doctor. In Witchmark he develops a quick romance with the Amarathine Tristan Hunter. Witchmark was nominated for Nebula Award, and a Lambda Literary Award (for LGBTQ content), and won the World Fantasy Award for Novel. It's a pleasant read, with not very involved world-building and not very well-drawn characters, and it should not in my view have been a candidate for any major awards. There are two sequels (so far) that I do not feel at all inspired to read.

Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

Powers is the third and final volume of the series "Annals of the Western Shore." It is a longer and more substantial book than the previous two, telling the story of Gavir, a Marshland boy taken as a slave when very young, on to his adulthood. While a slave, he is privileged to learn to read, and his special gifts include a remarkable ability to recall what he has read, and a power to dream of the future. He escapes from slavery after his sister is murdered, and wanders the country, first among various bands of men, and later among his own people, leading him towards his own destiny. A powerful capstone to Le Guin's series. (Reading Le Guin directly after reading Maggie Stiefvater only makes Le Guin's stature as a writer seem more towering.) 

The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

This is the fourth volume of a quartet called The Raven Cycle. I read and wrote about the first three volumes a year ago, and nearly abandoned the series back then when I learn of the existence of further volumes beyond the four. The series has been on a devolving course since the first book, and it accelerates downwards even more in this final book of the quartet. The writing is not very good, the overall ideas of the story are poorly thought out, and many of the characters exist solely to advance the plot. Basically, the quartet is like a teen series on The CW network, where trite scenarios are played out against shifting contexts as plots move forward just for the sake of being plots. The hell with making any sense out of the whole, just move from one scene to the next with hand-waving or faux logic. Why this author sells at all seems to depend on a complete lack of standards amongst her readership. 

Witch-Cult Abbey by Mark Samuels

In Witch-Cult Abbey (2020) by Mark Samuels, a former book cataloguer named Saul Prior is called during WWII to Thool Abbey in Hertfordshire to catalog a library of strange books. He is basically kept prisoner for years (his only sense of the passage of time being the arrival of Revd. Alfonsus Winters--a nod to Montague Summers in many ways--who tells him it is eight years since he arrived there), in this strangely funereal house of shifting sizes covered in endless darkness. And then the book gets stranger. I found it quite compelling and enjoyed it greatly. (I've similarly enjoyed a bunch of Samuels's previous books, and reviewed a couple of them at this blog.) The overly tall format is a bit cumbersome, but the design is otherwise nice. Too bad the limitation is so small (199 numbered and 24 lettered copies). A book like this one is infinitely better than most of the crap commercially published for a much larger readership, and that is a real shame.  

The Last Cat Book, by Robert E. Howard

This is a rather different offering from Robert E. Howard, known for his Conan stories. It is a brief essay on cats from the early 1930s originally titled "The Beast from the Abyss." Here it is amplified with over fifty linoleum prints by Peter Kuper. It's a delightful match of text with illustrator.  The text gives many keen observations of the feline nature:

His manner is at once arrogant and debased.

He arches his back and rubs himself against humanity's leg, dirging a doleful plea, while his eyes glare threats and his claws slide convulsively in and out of their padded sheaths. 

And the illustrations follow through wonderfully. I reread this with pleasure every decade or so since it came out in 1984.