Fear my book fu!

The Guardian asked readers for the most frightening book they'd ever read, and one commenter praised "Each Thing I Show You is a Piece of My Death," downloadable from the Clockwork Phoenix anthology.

The title is meant to be presented in lower case. This affectation is not symbolic, experimental, or clever; everyone goes through this phase, and it embarrasses us all equally in retrospect. (Yes, us. Stop looking at me like that.) Presenting a lower case title (or story, Bob forbid) to readers is tantamount to asking them to read your emo poetry, written in tears and black eyeliner.

It doesn't get any better as I go on. If you liked this story or know the authors, I suggest you stop here.

Before I launch into the actual review, the fact that I even need to comment on the punctuation--the punctuation!--is a problem. A good grasp of punctuation is as important to authors as a good grasp of spelling and grammar, because that's how you break your writing into coherent and navigable pieces for the reader. It should never be an obstacle course. Specific to this story:
- Quotation marks indicate that a phrase or passage is a quotation. They do not indicate emphasis. Their use to indicate irony is disputed and discouraged. When they're used too frequently to indicate irony, they also indicate that the author lacks confidence and using irony as a crutch.
- A dash mid-dialogue indicates a parenthetical aside; a dash at the end indicates an interruption. Dashes gouging dialogue all over the damn place indicate that the author doesn't know how to use commas and periods.
- Ellipses indicate omitted text. They do not indicate a dramatic pause. They do not indicate the end of a sentence. Overuse of (misused) ellipses is the equivalent of using passive voice: the writing comes across as apathetic, the characters as ambivalent. This story is riddled with ellipses--57 spattered across some 29 pages like freckles. It makes me wonder what the authors couldn't be bothered to say, why their editor(s) didn't jump on this, and what the story might have been were this alone tightened up.

"Each Thing" opens with an extraneous prologue full of artsy-fartsy wordplay that reads like a diary entry tacked onto the story because its author thought it sounded cool. It does nothing to tell the story, it adds nothing to the story, and it derails the establishment of the story's tone; its matching epilogue knocks the end back off the rails. The story would be greatly improved by the removal of this senseless frame. The real beginning is an article about a nude man who is suddenly appearing in the background of film footage, complete with overwrought and unconvincing assertions that his post-production insertion as a prank is technologically improbable. The story then moves on to unrealistic articles about two indie filmmakers, just so damn cool and innovative, who are collaborating on a film series featuring found and contributed pieces.

At this point, any horror fan worth their salt knows from the opening article exactly where this story is going. Why? Because we all saw "The Ring," too!

The opening article tips the story's hand. In this kind of horror, the mystery of the menace is a large part of the story's functionality. Once you've given away the mystery, it's time to wrap things up, not to explain and elaborate. The authors may have intended for the man's identity or origin to be the mystery, but the opening article instead establishes the mystery as the man's significance. That is sorted obviously and early (because we've all seen "The Ring"), making most of the story one very long denouement. A change to the structure of the story, by moving the opening article or switching the order in which information was revealed, might solve this problem.

Let's follow that tangent for a moment. Never explain horror. How the killer hunts is plot. How the doctor made the monster is backstory. How Sadako/Samara made the video is sabotage. It's pointing out the zipper in your monster's suit. At several points in the story, where the authors no doubt felt they were giving us clues to keep us moving along, they were instead pointing out zippers for us. ( And spoilers ). Once you point out the zipper, your monster loses its menace.

The story's structure is partially to blame for its bigger flaw: a distinct absence of anything intimidating. A disturbing image or unusual event does not in and of itself create fear, and the authors are limited by the epistolary style they've chosen. They go on to work against themselves with their clashing 'sources' and tones. All of their articles are painfully blatant exposition in the same false and chirpy tone. All of their dialogue reads as the same self-conscious TV script sarcasm, regardless of who's speaking or what's being said. Articles, interviews, IM logs: they all read like The Authors' Voice. There's no characterization, depth or emotion and the result is a lack of verisimilitude that cripples the whole story.

We're told about but feel no concern for a terminally ill off-screen name who exists only to be killed for a hint of threat. There's no grief or fear at several other off-screen deaths, seemingly killed because the authors can't be bothered with them anymore. Our filmmakers swear off electronics (no spoiler tags; anyone who doesn't see this coming should stick to Dick & Jane) and even then there's no fear, no concern, no emotion in their stilted dialogue.

The strings and stage props are just too obvious to ignore, from the reliance on name-dropping and referencing in lieu of actual description to the half-hearted attempt to shock readers with clinical death scene descriptions. I didn't care in the end, about the characters or their boogeyman.

This is, by leaps and bounds, one of King's best, and part of what makes it stand out is that it doesn't read like Stephen King.

Plot, just because: during a hike on the Appalachian Trail, a parental attempted at forced bonding, Trisha steps off the path for a moment to escape the incessant arguing between her mother and brother. City girl that she is, she thinks she can just cut across the woods to catch up, but she quickly loses her way in the wilderness. As she tries to find the path, any path, she clings to her Walkman and her daydreams about her favorite ballplayer, Tom Gordon, and fights her self-destructive fears. Oh, yeah, and there might be something in the woods stalking her.

There is none of King's author-as-protagonist here, nor his nostalgic-author-as-youth-as-protagonist. Our heroine is purely contemporary (well, in 1998), a nine-year-old girl with a moody older brother and recently divorced parents. Trisha acts like a child of divorced parents, trying too hard to play peacemaker and pretend that everything's okay, despite her father's increasing drinking and her brother's constant criticism. It falls perfectly into place with her as a nine-year-old girl, straddling that narrowing line between playing make-believe with her dolls and swooning over boys. In both roles, she is at times both too young and too old for her age. The occasional strand of adult thought slinks through, hinting at the nearness of adolescence, when that strand becomes a tripwire and parents suddenly wonder when their happy-go-lucky mudpie-eating monster became a sarcastic black-clad vegetarian.

The novel isn't really about her impending adolescence, or the divorced family; that's backstory. Though the novel is a coming of age tale (well, that's very King, true), this is no bittersweet trip to see a dead body and grow the fuck up already. This rite of passage is a trial by ordeal, the heroine is forced to dig down deep, not to confront her widdle feelings but to face the very real probability that she will die.

I appreciated how little we saw of the family. Back at the family, a few Kingisms briefly slipped in--near-psychic foreshadowing and sexual reaction as substitute emotion, mainly--and had they been in more of the book, it would have become some big thing about a family that's lost its daughter, rather than a girl lost in the woods, and the latter is the better story.

I hate those two particular Kingisms, incidentally: the disclaimer and the erection.

There are, thankfully, no descriptions of hard nipples or erections masquerading as emotions in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Had Trisha been Travis, he'd have popped wood over the taste of berries, the sound of a breaking branch, and the sight of hills, and maybe reminisced about his first time jerking off. Had Trisha been an adult, her nipples would have tingled at the first scary bit and she'd have remembered an old lover at some point. The body reacts to emotion in many ways, yes, but slapping a hard-on on a character to show us that they're afraid or excited does not get the job done, and more often it stinks of shock value antics served up in lieu of showing the readers fear or excitement. As a nine-year-old girl, Trisha's heart races, her stomach clenches, her mouth tastes of copper and the light gets too bright, all of that and a dozen more real, palpable physical reactions to fear happen without King ever once telling us about her nipples.

"Let me tell you now that this character dies, and it's tragic. Now back to seventy-three more pages of following him around and knowing that he's going to kick it. Let's pretend it's foreshadowing or a cloud of doom or something!" That's not a cloud of doom, that's cheating to get a sense of foreboding. You don't kill a character before you kill them, because then his death, when it actually happens, will have less impact on the reader. Trisha's fate is in doubt all the way through, and it kept me tearing through pages.

Another Kingism touched on but ultimately averted is the Visible Monster. King occasionally writes straight out of the era of rubber masks and atomic aliens, and describes the monster right down to the zipper the audience shouldn't see. Here he plays with the other side of that, the lurking fear just out of sight, the monster that might just be a turn of the shadows, that might all be in a little girl's head as she tries to sleep out in the dark woods. What really impressed me was ( this possible spoiler ).

Although I didn't like that King ( did this thing that might be a spoiler ), I appreciate why he took that route, and why it was necessary to the story. I think, had it been written differently, sounded less dismissive, I'd not have blinked at it. That said, I wonder if it means someone besides King edited this book. It's a short book, incredibly short by King's standards (you could kill a man with a copy of The Stand, and I'm not talking about the hardcover either), and that's a very good thing. Short, tight stories make for better reads than long, masturbatory "I don't need no stinkin' editor!" rambles.

Evidence: this too-long review!

All in all, this novel deserves far, far more attention than it has gotten. Our classic little girl growing up stories revolve so much around fantasy, with Alice dreaming herself lost down a rabbit hole, and Coraline seeking out the world behind the walls on a boring day. Even our more pratical heroines, Tiffany traipsing through Elf-land with her horde of demonic smurfs, and Jane touching the old religion in the form of the powerful, wild and lonely Greenwitch, had an adult at the length of their safety harness, some hand or spirit to intervene if her passage to adulthood took a too-treacherous turn. Trisha drops into little girl lost literature darkly, by herself, with only herself, and the only adult hand or spirits reaching out to her are ( full of tasty spoilers ) her fantasy of a baseball player whose only real answer is that she's got to do it herself.

I wasn't keen on the first 'between the numbers' Stephanie Plum novel. I have a serious hatred for Christmas specials in which (gasp!) Santa is real, it bugs me to see a book so obviously written just for money, and there's a convolution in logic in these side-novels that just bugs me.

This one started off on the wrong foot by having extra large text. I remember that trick of padding out short papers back in school, and I resent it in short stories priced as paperbacks. At some point in the story though, some combination of plot and joke and mokiebrain clicked, and it started working for me in a way the Christmas story didn't.

It also brought to mind the Anita Blake books, because where it works is where the Blake books fall short.

Longtime readers of the Anita Blake books resent the hypersexuality of the later books because of Anita's priggishness in earlier books and author Hamilton's pretensions about the nature of sex in her story; it comes off as hypocrisy, denial and Mary Sueism. The general consensus was, "Great, Hamilton's getting laid, now can we get back to the mystery novels?" By comparison, readers accept that the Plum series is a romance/comedy/mystery hybrid and Evanovich is up front about it, and has fun with it.

The Blake series has also been scarred by Hamilton's controlling streak. It manifests in a similar nature in her character, in the constant 'power ups' she throws in so that her heroine always comes out on top, and more humorously, in her interviews. (Seriously, read up about how she swore there'd be no gratuitous sex, made the entire plot revolve around sex, and then refused to admit that she did so and bent over backwards to claim there's been no change. Or just read up about this ardeur thing, and realize that she and diehard fans take it seriously.)

Evanovich lets her character have flaws. Plum screws up, she admits to screwing up, and comes out ahead often by sheer luck and dogged tenacity. She doesn't need superpowers, and she doesn't need a "the world is at stake!" excuse to have sex. (Well, okay, in one book. I still hold that against the series.) She's not afraid to not be Superwoman.

Ironically, the Blake series, with all its sexual hang-ups and contradictions, is far smuttier than the outright romance novels with their unabashedly gleeful lust. Ha!

Finished Canticle for Liebowitz--more about this later.

Damn but author Harris mentions St. Louis a lot. ( Spoilerish talk for Silence and its prequel in here... ) And in between, all over the place, are little mentions, this person in St. Louis, that office in St. Louis, that thing that happened once upon a time in St. Louis, back when Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis, hey meet me in St. Louis, is that enough of St. Louis yet? And so forth.

I thought maybe Harris was a local. We get a little too excited about seeing our name in print hereabouts, and he seems to like naming landmarks in the way some local authors do, to prove their familiarity. According to Wikipedia, he's from Tennessee, but it says nothing of where he lived later, or where he is nowadays.

In more relevant news, maybe Silence isn't all that bad. It definitely suffers from a sluggish middle, and slogging through that was logoriffic misery. Then, suddenly, I couldn't put the book down. The artsy-awkward and pretentious wording has toned itself down as Harris forgets to be lit'ry and just tells us the damn story already; that helps immensely. The things that did not work well in the story were left behind or dropped away after ( a spoiler ), which is a bit disappointing.

Sure, using a thief to catch a thief (or psycho, as the case may be) could be considered a hang-up in itself. The investigation had become dependent on Lecter giving information; he was holding Starling's hand through the whole thing. ( Spoilers happen, and then>With Lecter out of the way,</lj-cut> the investigators have to stand on their own two feet, and Starling has to do her own thinking. That's the positive spin, at least. In reality, it's more that what should have been cat-and-mouse between Lecter and Starling was tedious and masturbatory ego-stroking on the doctor's part.<blockquote> )

A sad little poem I'm copying down here, because I like it and hey, I think we're years past copyright concerns, eh?

"Babes in the Wood," Thomas Millington (1595)

Now ponder well, you parents deare,
These wordes which I shall write;
A doleful story you shall heare,
In time brought forth to light.

A gentleman of good account
In Norfolke dwelt of late,
Who did in honour far surmount
Most men of his estate.

Sore sicke he was, and like to dye,
No helpe his life could save;
His wife by him as sicke did lye,
And both possest one grave.

No love between these two was lost,
Each was to other kinde;
In love they liv'd, in love they dyed,
And left two babes behind:

The one a fine and pretty boy,
Not passing three yeares olde;
The other a girl more young than he
And fram'd in beautye's molde.

The father left his little son,
As plainlye doth appeare,
When he to perfect age should come
Three hundred poundes a yeare.

And to his little daughter Jane
Five hundred poundes in gold,
To be paid downe on marriage-day,
Which might not be controll'd:

But if the children chanced to dye,
Ere they to age should come,
Their uncle should possesse their wealth;
For so the wille did run.

"Now, brother," said the dying man,
"Look to my children deare;
Be good unto my boy and girl,
No friendes else have they here:

"To God and you I do commend
My children deare this day;
But little while be sure we have
Within this world to staye.

"You must be father and mother both,
And uncle all in one;
God knowes what will become of them,
When I am dead and gone."

With that bespake their mother deare:
"O brother kinde," quoth shee,
"You are the man must bring our babes
To wealth or miserie:

"And if you keep them carefully,
Then God will you reward;
But if you otherwise should deal,
God will your deedes regard."

With lippes as cold as any stone,
They kist the children small:
"God bless you both, my children deare;"
With that the teares did fall.

These speeches then their brother spake
To this sicke couple there:
"The keeping of your little ones,
Sweet sister, do not feare:

"God never prosper me nor mine,
Nor aught else that I have,
If I do wrong your children deare,
When you are layd in grave."

The parents being dead and gone,
The children home he takes,
And bringes them straite unto his house,
Where much of them he makes.

He had not kept these pretty babes
A twelvemonth and a daye,
But, for their wealth, he did devise
To make them both awaye.

He bargain'd with two ruffians strong,
Which were of furious mood,
That they should take the children young,
And slaye them in a wood.

He told his wife an artful tale,
He would the children send
To be brought up in faire London,
With one that was his friend.

Away then went those pretty babes,
Rejoycing at that tide,
Rejoycing with a merry minde,
They should on cock-horse ride.

They prate and prattle pleasantly
As they rode on the waye,
To those that should the butchers be,
And work their lives' decaye:

So that the pretty speeche they had,
Made murderers' heart relent:
And they that undertooke the deed,
Full sore did now repent.

Yet one of them, more hard of heart,
Did vow to do his charge,
Because the wretch, that hired him,
Had paid him very large.

The other would not agree thereto,
So here they fell to strife;
With one another they did fight,
About the children's life:

And he that was of mildest mood,
Did slaye the other there,
Within an unfrequented wood,
Where babes did quake for feare:

He took the children by the hand,
While teares stood in their eye,
And bade them come and go with him,
And look they did not crye:

And two long miles he ledd them on,
While they for food complaine:
"Stay here," quoth he, "I'll bring ye bread,
When I come back againe."

The prettye babes, with hand in hand,
Went wandering up and downe;
But never more they sawe the man
Approaching from the town.

Their prettye lippes with blackberries
Were all besmear'd and dyed;
And when they saw the darksome night,
They sat them downe and cryed.

Thus wandered these two prettye babes,
Till death did end their grief;
In one another's armes they dyed,
As babes wanting relief.

No burial these prettye babes
Of any man receives,
Till Robin-redbreast painfully
Did cover them with leaves.

[Another source adds the following stanzas, and gives the date as 1894; not sure if they were added later or if the version above was incomplete

And now the heavy wrath of God
Upon their uncle fell;
Yea, fearful fiends did haunt his house,
His conscience felt an hell:
His barns were fired, his goods consumed,
His hands were barren made,
His cattle died within the field,
And nothing with him stayed.

And in a voyage to Portugal
Two of his sons did die;
And to conclude, himself was brought
To want and misery:
He pawned and mortgaged all his land
Ere seven years came about.
And now at last this wicked act
Did by this means come out.

The fellow that did take in hand
These children for to kill,
Was for a robbery judged to die.
Such was God's blessed will:
Who did confess the very truth,
As here hath been displayed:
The uncle having died in jail,
Where he for debt was laid.

You that executors be made,
And overseers eke,
Of children that be fatherless,
And infants mild and meek,
Take you example by this thing,
And yield to each his right,
Lest God with suchlike misery
Your wicked minds requite.]

Finished Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich, read a draft of "Dirty Bomb" and "Finches II" by A.M. Muffaz. Lo, there's lots more in private entries waiting to be edited, but this is getting too complicated--this needs to be a "thoughts whilst reading" sort of journal, not a second Bibliophile--so instead of transcribing every item read into this journal, I'm going to just plop in the odd thought, as a placeholder against later Bibliophileness (as I meant to be doing in the first place). It's my own fault, for letting these things pile up.

But anyway, what do I think whilst reading?

First, that Afi's worries about "Dirty Bomb" not being Afi-ish enough are just silly. That subtle sense of wrongness that is present in all of her works, like a little voice in the back of your head asking "Did I leave that window open when I left this morning?" or the sense that someone is standing behind you in a room that you tell yourself is definitely empty, is definitely there. True, the story needs editing, to make it really sparkle with elusive malice and enigmatic menace, but that's just the details getting in the way.

Second, that "Finches II" might very well be better than its predecessor, which is really something when you take into account that "Finches" was brilliant. Before we followed a man of faith watching his world devolve and rot. Here we follow his liberal son as he suffocates within the homicidally conservative confines of his father's house, trying to pick up the pieces of the older man's rebellion against the profanity of life.

And it's creepy as hell, to boot.

Also, it works well as a standalone short story. Though reading "Finches" adds some depth to the overall story, it's not necessary--all of the necessary elements are there, and the story works quite well without them.

And did I mention it's creepy as hell? You'd better believe it.

Count Cain, Volume 4 - Kaori Yuki [Count Cain manga]
Available online at Sakura-Crisis.net!

For reference: Bibliophile's June 2005 listings.

I'm still hung up on Dr. Disraeli's first name being Jezebel. It's like "A Boy Named Sue" with sluttier lyrics.

For all the drama, I found this whole volume oddly boring, and cringed to see that the story continued on into the next volume. Nevermind the "Ugh, a Ripper story" groan factor--the whole lost memories, gravedigging, all in the family feeling of it just felt like rehashed Cain. Of course, I try to keep in mind that I'm reading a volume in one sitting, a few days after reading the volume that came before, while the story itself was released over time in serial format, so things weren't as condensed as they are for me.

Still, ugh, a Ripper story.

Fruits Basket, Volume 13-5 - Takaya Natsuki [Fruits Basket manga]
(Sorry folks, it's a downloaded scanlation. Look for the manga at your local library or bookshop!)

For reference: Bibliophile's June 2005 listings.

Oh, the absolute, undeniable Ayamelove! Oh, the sweet, lovely Momijisadness! Oh, the bittersweet Kyoness!

We finally find out what Akito said to Yuki at the beachhouse, explaining his recent oddness, and get a look at their shared past, explaining their everyday oddness. (My obsession with Akito continues despite Afi's better judgement.)

We finally get a backstory on Rin, but it doesn't make her drama any more interesting to me. With her quest and Tohru's running parallel and the vague comments near the end of chapter 82, I have to wonder if the timing of Rin's appearance isn't meant to give a physical face to Tohru's crumbling inner state. Afi loves her for the relationship with Haru and the gothicwear, but give me insanity in a kimono anyday.

We finally see some real Shigure manipulation, but I don't see the slimy user that others insist he is. There's a nasty job to be done, and unlike the others cursed Sohmas, he's actually willing to do it, and willing to be as ruthless and cunning as he needs to be in the process. He's learned how to play the family's little political game, to manage Akito so that he stays close enough to remain in his good graces but far enough out of reach to operate freely. He might be in it only for himself, and the wariness that some of the others show around him (Hatori, for instance) certainly suggests that they don't think he's in it for them; we've seen him play freely with the kids' heads, and later more seriously with ( Who? ), and always it's struck me as a cool, calculating and purposeful act, as if he was testing them, storing the gathered information in a little mental file for possible later use.

But where Afi calls him a conman who keeps his cards close to his chest, I would say instead that he's just very, very aware of the risks he's taking and knows better than anyone how hard it is to keep a secret from the even-more-devious Akito. Maybe I just recognize in him a very Scorpio way of being that makes perfect sense to me.

Akito and Shigure deviousness. Ooh yes. If it's worth anything, I do so love the selfless Kyo moment at the end of chapter 75 (volume 13) too, even if both he and Tohru are big ol' doofuses. Poor Catboy.

But nevermind such seriousness: school play! The gothic nightmare that is Hanajima as Cinderella! Lo, have some quoteness:

Yuki-as-Fairy-Godmother: "I shall grant any wish you may have tonight."
Hanajima-as-Cinderella: "My, that's wonderful...burn the ballroom until it's no more than ash."
Yuki-as-Fairy-Godmother: "That's a crime...please wish for something a little softer and innocent."
Hanajima-as-Cinderella: "Grilled meat..."

And now--oh no! I'm caught up with the scanlations! NOOOOOOOOO!

Detective Bluecat - Modoru Motoni
- Volume 1 - Volume 3 Case 8
Available online at Fifay.net!

For reference: Bibliophile's June 2005 listings.

Okay, this is just fucking weird, man. Reading Aestheticism.com's background information helped some, but still, there were moments of pure "Hwa?" here and there. Eventually the silliness and the yaoi just overwhelmed me and pantsed me into submission. The Aestheticism.com review also helped me pin down what it was that was bothering me about the dialogue in Fifay's scanlation, namely that somebody just overcomplicated everything instead of using ordinary English. Not to bite the hand that feeds, but oy, it was a headache.

From case 3: "I would never think of stepping into your rabbit hole if it was not...because of the pants."

By the time Hachioji finally blew up and demanded they stop saying "pants," I was in tears. Oh, also, I can't use names like "Bee-Prince" and "Tigerman." I just can't. I'll stick with the Japanese names and just bear in mind the animal punniness, thanks.

Çase 4 made me uncomfortable, despite the lovely story and the teen-ish image of the "simple-minded boy prostitute" that Aestheticism.com chose, because there's no getting around the fact that the prostitute isn't just a simple-minded boy, he's a mentally retarded prepubescent child. It crossed a squicky line for me (in the 'gut reaction rather than moral outrage' sense of the first definition, because unlike some people, I can tell the difference between a work of fiction involving a drawing and a real child being abused). ( A brief spoilery moment! )

But then along came case 6, and I was saved from uncomfortable eeping by much eyerolling at the farfetched resolution!