The Tales of Patrick Merla

This slim collection was published in 1985. It contains nine stories (two of which are so short as to be negligible), puffed out with wide margins and blank pages to make up a page-count of 103. All are fairy stories, which the publisher says are "in the tradition of George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brother Grimm."  Well, maybe, but Merla's tales do not stand up well next to those by such classic authors. Edmund White, in a review of the book in the Washington Post of September 22, 1985, noted that: 

Often a Merla tale begins with a vice--pride, cruelty, greed--that is exercised with stubborn willfulness. Next a terrible fate befalls the vicious man or woman, who must then set out in a quest of atonement. After much suffering (and isolation), the voyager is forgiven and learns the error of his or her ways. 

Which is true, but White fails to account for the lack of fairy tale magic in the stories. They never engage the reader, and each story merely plods on until it reaches its end. There is no literary style, no wry modern perspective, nothing to make these routine tales stand out. John Gardner was writing such modern fairy tales (I reviewed some collections below) at the same time as Merla, yet Gardner did it much better.

Storm Front, by Jim Butcher

Most of the lists that I have seen of best fantasy novels of the 21st century include something by Jim Butcher, usually Storm Front, which is the first book of his multi-volumed series, "The Dresden Files," named after the main character, Harry Dresden, a Chicago-based "wizard" who works with the police to solve unusual (often occult) crimes. The series is currently up to seventeen novels, with more to come. Storm Front is plot-driven commercial fiction, written in the first person in Harry Dresden's own jocular and self-deprecating style. The mystery is engaging enough, but the prose reads simply like a fleshed-out screenplay, heavy on the dialogue. It's no surprise, then, that the SyFy channel produced one season of a show called The Dresden Files consisting of twelve episodes. Episode 8 is titled "Storm Front" and is partly based on this novel. Though disappointed by the novel (mostly because of the style in which it is written), I tuned into the series and watched all twelve episodes. Fun, but not great, and of course the series was cancelled after one season, so it barely got the chance to set-up its secondary world. I'm glad to have experienced one novel, but I'm not inspired to read any further.

The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw

This novella can perhaps best be described as body horror. It is the story of two characters: the narrator, who is called a mermaid but isn't one by usual definitions; and her associate, called the "plague doctor," who is given annoying and distracting they/their pronouns (my gripe is in the using of a plural term for a singular entity). The pair have escaped the destruction of the mermaid's husband's world, which has been devoured and destroyed by the unrelenting teeth of their daughters. The pair meet some odd children, mired in the worship and rituals of three mysterious surgeons, who kill, maim, and even bring the children back to life. Of course there is a clash between the differing parties. It results in an impressive display of different kinds of bodily mutilation. The prose is dense, sometimes smooth but often clotted. I'm not sure there is a point to it all. The ending is cliched. And oddly, after the acknowledgements at the end of the book, there is a seven page story giving the set-up for the book. If it is extraneous, why include it at all? Or rather, if is is essential, why isn't it at the beginning of the book? Much about this novella seems half-baked, when it isn't being deliberately pretentious. Intriguing, but with considerable problems.