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. 

Clown in a Cornfield, by Adam Cesare

I saw a new movie, Clown in a Cornfield. It's a vapid mess, filled with cliches upon cliches, and with characters whose actions and motivations do not make any sense. It is plotted like a roller-coaster ride, and once you are strapped in, you follow it to the end, slightly amused by a few unexpected twists. I learned it was based on a novel, so out of absurd curiosity, I read the novel to see if it makes any more sense than the movie. In short, it doesn't.  It's written as a thriller-- in simple words to pad out the screenplay plot. The movie streamlines the plot, and alters many things. But the characters still operate as the author needs them to instead of within the context of their situation. As one character puts in in the middle of the book, "she had no idea why any of her dumbass friends did the dumbass things they did."  Neither does the reader. More bewilderingly I learn there are two sequels Clown in a Cornfield 2 and Clown in a Cornfield 3. I can't see a market for such books or movies beyond vacuous teens, but they must be a multitude.

The Wrath of Peace or How the Wellikens Saved the World, by Jack Zipes

Jack Zipes is some months shy of 88, He is a renowned scholar of folklore and fairy tales, including critical works as well as translations and anthologies. The Wrath of Peace or How the Wellikans Saved the World is a story written for and dedicated to his grandchildren Anya and Little Jack, about two twin witches Anja and Zack who try to save the world from the evil dictator Nexus with help from the Wellikans, a hidden and underground magical people. Nexus is described in completely Trumpian terms, a man born to be a "genius" who became bitter, narcissistic and cruel on his way to rule the world, using poisons to diminish the humanity of the people he rules over. The blurb on the rear cover says: "it is a hopeful tale of resistance and defiance," but the manner in which Anja and Zack laugh and dance their way through the story belies the seriousness of how to resist a real world tyrant. Still what's left is a mostly pleasant short tale (about ninety pages), but the feel-good attitude about how to deal with Nexus  diminishes both the impact of the story and its relevance to the modern world.

The Bone Man, by Frederic S. Durbin

The Bone Man is a novelette from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007, here published as a chapbook with illustrations by Daniel Williams. Durbin's story begins familiarly: a traveler stumbles upon some sort of local festival in an unnamed Midwestern town. Here the stranger is a hit man, Conlin, who has just finished a job. He comes to a town on Halloween that is preparing for an annual parade for The Bone Man, an animate skeleton who can only be seen by some people. Conlin is intrigued, and stays for the festival. Durbin notes in a six-page Afterword that the town takes some aspects from Sauk City, Wisconsin, the home of his first publisher, Arkham House, who released his novel Dragonfly in 1999. Durbin has published two other books, a novel A Green and Ancient Light in 2016; and a serial from Cricket Magazine  as The Star Shard in 2012. The Bone Man is well-written and stylistically appealing, and because of this I ordered copies of all three of Durbin's books. The illustrations by Daniel Williams are symbolic rather than representative of the plot, but they complement it nicely.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth, by R.B. Russell

The ingredients used to make this novel promise something delectable. There is a deceased and disreputable writer,  Cyril Heldman, who wrote weird and occultish tales and who died under very strange circumstances. His literary executor, Catherine Richards, whose house is crammed full of books, papers, newspapers, herself dies bizarrely in the first chapter: by falling from the sky onto the nearby roof of her longtime friend Tanya Sewell, who is also Catherine's niece, after meeting and marrying Tanya's widowed uncle years earlier. Tanya inherits Catherine's house, which she had known in childhood, and becomes involved in several mysteries, particularly to do with an online forum devoted to Heldman that has its usual share of cranks and trolls. Add to this an unscrupulous book dealer and a collector of occult artifacts, bent on finding Heldman's relic called the Sixtystone (lifted from one of Arthur Machen's tales), which was the subject of one of Heldman's novels, and you have the basics of an intriguing literary weird tale. The writing, too, is fine, but somewhere along the line, the characters begin to act in ways that don't fit with how they were established, and they make decisions that move the plot forward at the expense of literary belief; and the workings of the Sixtystone, never really set forth, are variable enough to belie concrete aspects of the plot and leave important points (like the methodology of strange deaths) without any context. The result is somewhat unsatisfying, but it is a mostly pleasant read to reach the end of the novel. 

Barrowbeck, by Andrew Michael Hurley

Novelist Andrew Michael Hurley has published what is basically a thirteen story collection, centered around a fictional border town between Yorkshire and Lancashire called Barrowbeck. This provides a thin skein that connects the stories, and the hint that the setting is something rather more significant enters into only a few of the tales. The first is set in the distant past, while the final story is set in 2041 in a post-climate crisis. These bookends turn out to be the best in the book, while the rest are various kinds of oddities. A baby is grown from a plant by a kind of witch for a childless couple. Disadvantaged children are bussed into the town for a day to enjoy life before being taken back to their grim existence--this inspires one local boy to an unusual solution. A domestic story of two close sisters turns very cryptic at the end when a B&B guest returns to find them cocooned in a back room. Hurley plays with different styles, and with different types of story, but most feel fragmentary and as a whole the collection remains less than satisfactory, though not without some high points.