Tales from Beyond the Rainbow, collected and adapted by Pete Jordi Wood

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, edited by Becky Siegel Spratford

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. 

The Lie Tree, by Frances Hardinge

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.

The Candle Man, by Catherine Fisher

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.  

H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon for Beginning Readers, by R.J. Ivankovic

 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.  
 

Helen's Story by Rosanne Rabinowitz

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.

Jules, Penny & the Rooster, by Daniel Pinkwater

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.