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.