Orphans of the Tide, by Struan Murray

Orphans of the Tide is an odd YA novel, concerning the residents of an island City who fear the periodical resurgence of the Enemy who takes over a person to be his Vessel for rebirth. This tale follows Ellie, an independent young orphan with a superiority complex, and her young friends, including other orphans and a boy she has plucked out of the body of a dead whale. Everyone has jumped to the conclusion that the boy is the Vessel, and he must be killed. The plot is somewhat silly, and the reasons the plot advances are coincidental and sillier, with twists and a completely illogical resolution. This is the first book of a trilogy, but I barely made it through this one and want no more.     

H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, by R.J. Ivankovic

This is the third of three books retelling H.P. Lovecraft's stories, with artwork and clanky verse, both in the style of Dr. Seuss. The first was  H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers, the second was H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon for Beginning Readers. The first was fun, the second didn't quite work as well, but the third, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, is probably the best of the three. For one, it takes on one of the best of Lovecraft's stories, and it is a long story as well, which gives the reader a lot more text and many more illustrations to enjoy. Which makes one wonder about who really is the audience for these books?  Per the titles, they are supposed to be for beginning readers, but especially with the much more complex third volume, I wonder whether any beginning readers can actually enjoy these books.  Probably they are really for Lovecraft's older fans looking for a new way to re-experience the familiar stories. At least, that's how it works for me.  

Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats

Ursula K. Le Guin died  in 2018, with many highly distinguished books under her belt, plus a few real clunkers. Now comes Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats, from the Library of America, a slim hardcover with poems, some prose, and a whole lot of cat doodles by Le Guin, plus a lot of white space. No editor is listed, but one hears someone else's voice in the essay "The Lives of Ursula's Cats."  Overall it seems either a harmless ditty, or crass commercialism. This is one of her clunkers. For ailurophiles only. 

Galactic Pot-Healer, by Philip K. Dick

Every once in a while, when the modern world seems especially insane, I read another Philip K. Dick book as a kind of therapy.  Last time it was Time Out of Joint, ten years ago. On this very blog.  I concluded:  "I wonder: has the modern world come too closely to resemble Philip Dick's mindscape, that the impact of his novels is lessened?"

This time, I picked up Galactic Pot-Healer, and came away with similar if slightly different feelings. Earthman Joe Fernwright has a dead-end job, with diminished prospects, fixing ceramic pots, in a future America that seems depressingly familiar to our own present, with an overreaching government that is bent on repressing speech and thought, and crushing dissent and artistic expression. The Glimmung is a strange and powerful being on Plowman's Planet, who brings Joe Fernwright and a host of various odd aliens there to raise an ancient sunken cathedral named Heldscalla from the deep ocean. There these beings discourse on the meaning of life and whether the ever-updating Book of the Kalends is completely prophetic. The Earth-based initial chapters were almost too painful to read, but once Joe Fernwright gets to Plowman's Planet, Dick's bizarre imagination takes over. The ending doesn't quite live up to the set-up, but it still is a window into Dick's highly unusual brain. 

Dick wrote an earlier short children's novel about the Glimmung that was published posthumously as Nick and the Glimmung. There is a joy in reading it that is lacking in this adult novel. 

The Chas. Addams Mother Goose

In the wake of the popularity of the first Addams Family television series, which ran from 1964-1966, cartoonist Charles Addams published The Chas. Addams Mother Goose, an oversized volume which contains some twenty-seven familiar nursery rhymes, each accompanied by one or more Addams illustrations that give a macabre interpretation to the nursery rhyme. It is pleasant for what it is, but one could wish for a volume with four or five times the number of nursery rhymes.  Here are a few examples, enough to decide whether the humor is for you or not. 

                                                       Girls and boys, 

                                                         Come out to play.

                                                       The moon does shine

                                                         As bright as day.

                                                       Come with a hoop.

                                                         Come with a cal,

                                                       Come with a good will,

                                                         Or not at all.  

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.