2014 read #103: The Voice of the Mountain by Manly Wade Wellman.

The Voice of the Mountain by Manly Wade Wellman
179 pages
Published 1984
Read from October 30 to October 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Somehow this book, the last Silver John novel, doesn't seem as, well, bad as the others. I'm being unfair, or rather, the last two Silver John books retroactively made me dislike the first two; going back to my original reviews, I find I liked The Old Gods Waken and After Dark just fine, or at least no less than I liked this one. But The Lost and the Lurking was ruined by its ridiculous plot, and The Hanging Stones was such a mess, I must number it among the worst books I've read all year. Together they made me brace for the worst as I prepared to push through one final book to complete the series. Perhaps finding The Voice in the Mountain so unexpectedly painless makes it seem like a better book than it is. (These grades are all arbitrary anyway, so who cares?)

There's still plenty to cringe over here, just not as much as there has been in previous volumes. There's the requisite down-home, sensible, righteous young man (who's totally different from the others in every prior Silver John book, because this one has a beard!), but he disappears after three chapters and doesn't show his face again until the very end, when he's needed for the happy reunion scene. (Which makes it strange that he gets such a detailed and eccentric backstory -- a foundling child named Tombs because he was left in a graveyard -- which never has any relevance to the plot.) There's the mountain village so romanticized it verges on parody, a place of respectable hard-working folks and bright healthy children, the sort of misty-eyed dream a Southern conservative might believe in when idealizing the virtues of Appalachian poverty. There are Wellman's female characters, either wizened old witches, seductive young witches, or rosy-cheeked hill country Madonnas sent from on high to be helpmeets for the requisite down-home young men. There are the pacing issues that have plagued most of these books -- the rising action consists of Silver John sitting in a room, gabbing with the witches, while the villain reads a book in a different room, and occasionally pops in to have a sandwich or to put a movie on his magic window for his guests to enjoy. (I'm not even kidding.)

Yet the worst of Wellman's recurring motifs are blessedly absent. The villain is neither a lost race "here before the Indians" nor an '80s-style Satanist panic, but rather a buckskin version of John Dee that could almost have been an interesting character had he not been written by Wellman in his later years. In fact, the character of Ruel Harpe (for such is the villain's name) goes a long way toward making Voice feel closer to "Walk Like a Mountain," the 1955 story that got me interested in Silver John, than to the rubbish the last couple novels proved to be. Glimpses of creatures from Appalachian folklore also help link Voice to the Old Weird Americana I wished all these books had pursued (even if said creatures are little more than set dressings for the villain's evil mountain fortress). And even if, in the end, John outwits Ruel Harpe by getting him mad enough to lean in close to make a threat, thereby permitting John to snatch away his magic amulet in the corniest climax ever put to paper, well -- fuck it. At least I'm done with these novels now, and maybe -- maybe -- one day I'll care enough to shell out $25 for the collection of Silver John short stories, which might at least be worth reading.

2014 read #102: Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick.

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
255 pages
Published 1959
Read from October 29 to October 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

What is reality? How do we perceive what is real? How do we know whether what we perceive has any external reality? Dick has rather the specific métier: novelizations of freshman philosophy. Even The Man in the High Castle, an otherwise straightforward (and excellent) alternate history novel, ended with the titular man revealing that their universe is not the universe that should exist (and, for that matter, neither is ours). Dick was good at his schtick, as good as Tolkien was at writing elves simultaneously neighborly and otherworldly. Time Out of Joint is a solid entry in the Dick canon, a satisfying and occasionally brilliant unraveling of one man's reality, this time based in classic paranoid ideation. But after only five books and one short story, I'm starting to bump up against the limitations of Dick's thematic reach. And this novel in particular falls somewhat flat at the end, resorting to the stale Western European race myth of restless movement and colonization as an eternal motivator for human (read: white American) yearnings and behavior, reading more like an entry-level Heinlein than a Dick.

2014 read #101: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
311 pages
Published 1966
Read from October 24 to October 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I'll write this review as soon as I finish crying...

I'm glad I read the short story version first. The novel takes the same amount of storytelling power and gut-punching emotional impact and spreads it thin with a bunch of Freudian mumbo-jumbo and repressed memories and dissociative complexes and out of body experiences, all things that, I felt, didn't contribute much to the pre-existing perfection of the short story. Recovering Charlie's memories and discovering emotional and sexual hangups is a logical extension of the storyline, but having read the short story first, I guess I never felt it was at all necessary.

That last line, though. It doesn't matter that I read it a month ago. It still gets me. Right in the heart. Right in the everything. I don't know how such a straightforward line can pack in so much sadness, so much meaning, so many layers of feeling. That's real skill and artistry right there.

2014 read #100: War for the Oaks by Emma Bull.

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
319 pages
Published 1987
Read from October 21 to October 24
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

This most closely reminds me of Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring, another debut novel that mixes signs of great promise with a sort of gawky earnestness that no one could mistake for anything but the handiwork of a beginner. Similar to Brown Girl, Oaks makes a character out of the author's city, reading in places as much like a guide to late night eateries and local landmarks as a novel. Characters debate the merits of restaurants; climactic battles between the armies of Faery occur in parks and conservatories; a textbook example of a Fantasy Novel Prologue takes pains to establish the Nicollet Mall and the cascade of Peavey Plaza, locations scarcely referred to after the first chapter. Unlike Brown Girl, Oaks initially must struggle against the awkwardness of transcribing music and attempting to bring to life a local music scene on the page, and even after the novel finds its footing and emotional heart, the inevitable recurring concert and practice session descriptions tend to slow everything down. It's all worthwhile in the end, though, with a predictable but satisfying musical climax that made me want to get up out of my chair in spite of myself.

This is one of the seminal texts of urban fantasy, I'm told, and it's funny to see such future staples as the supernatural love triangle and the heroine donning black leather, though here there's a springtime freshness that brings sweet life to later cliches. And for what it's worth, this is the only book I've read that involves a local band covering "The Safety Dance" while performing for the dignitaries of Faery.

2014 read #99: The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman.

The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman
172 pages
Published 1982
Read from October 16 to October 21
Rating: ★½ out of 5

Subtlety has never been a priority in the Silver John novels. Silver John's world is a place of black and white, homespun good and greedy, sniveling evil, where a man can tell at a glance whether a person is a quietly reliable good ol' boy (or gal) or a sneaking no-goodnik, and first impressions are never wrong. It's a place where an elderly but spry paranormal investigator can be named Judge Pursuivant, and the heads of competing New Agey cults can call themselves Lady Sybil and Brother Magnus, and you aren't sure if Wellman is simply being lazy or honestly thinks he's clever. There will almost always be a sensible, hard-working blue collar boy with unexpectedly deep knowledge, and whenever he shows up, he will always get the sensible, no-nonsense girl with the simple winsome ways. There will almost always be muscle employed by the Big Bad, who will get his ass whupped by Silver John and come to immediate, grudging respect for him. In a crisis, the menfolk will plan and fight, and the women will cook up a big country supper. Black folks and Native Americans, when they show up, will be laconic but wise, invariably siding with the good ol' boys against the low-down sneaks, as if to make a point of "I have no problem with the good ones!"

Broadly speaking, it's self-congratulatory conservative American fantasy, tolerable only because I have a soft spot for Appalachian folklore and Old Weird Americana. The Hanging Stones is the second Silver John novel in a row (out of four I've read altogether) that eschews the folklore and the Old Weird altogether, instead retreading the then-timely New Age anxieties Wellman belabored in The Lost and the Lurking, but neglecting the confident pacing and assured storytelling that made that installment almost bearable. A typical Silver John scenario (werewolves as the supernatural threat, no good outsider businessman, good ol' boy and gal working for the baddie but sharing reservations about the whole thing) gets established early on, but Wellman continues piling on extraneous characters and story elements (another outsider businessman, two additional supernatural investigators, an offscreen seance with the "builders of Old Stonehenge," two competing New Agey leaders, John's wife shows up for the first time in four books because someone needs to get kidnapped) for a hundred pages, all too anemic to be considered subplots, having everybody talk and talk and have dinner and repeat the same basic conversation about "New Stonehenge" until he seemingly remembers Silver John novels are pretty damn short and that there were werewolves or something tossed in at the beginning, and maybe it's time to push the plot forward by (inevitably) having John's wife Evadare get kidnapped.

Stones has all the urgency and dynamism of a Burt I. Gordon film -- it would probably be a hell of a lot more readable if a snarky Minnesotan and his robots were there making fun of it over my shoulder. What earns this book my ire is the fact that it is so goddamned tedious. I've been reading the Silver John books because, despite their mediocrity, they're short and somewhat entertaining, breezy little stories I can finish in a day and a half. Stones is short but so boring it ate up four extra days I could have spent reading something better. I only have one more book before I finish the Silver John novels, and I've already gotten it from ILL, but I make a moue at it every time I see it in my library box. After Stones, it would take a hell of a story to get me interested in Silver John's world again.

2014 read #98: The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson.

The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
394 pages
Published 2003
Read from October 12 to October 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Hopkinson's first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, was the paradigm of a first novel, cautious and conventional, needing polish but telling a basic tale with a reasonable level of competence -- exactly the sort of novel you'd expect to win a "first novel" contest in the late '90s. Hopkinson's storytelling matured somewhat with Midnight Robber, a book daring in its language but, despite this newfound panache, still rather workmanlike in its plot and progression. The Salt Roads takes a massive leap in complexity and scope over the previous novels, an audacious story encompassing three women of African descent, enslaved in different ways in different times, unknowingly birthing and educating a goddess, and a brief look at that goddess' attempts to save, preserve, and liberate her people. Sheer boldness and painfulness of subject matter, however, only carries a novel so far, and Hopkinson's scattershot experimental narration does not cohere into as powerful statement as one could wish.

2014 read #97: Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis.

Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis
212 pages
Published 1987
Read from October 10 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A beautifully structured tale, rich with symmetry and surprising parallels. Willis' gentle prose supports a story that feels timeless, at least in a genre-specific sense: it could fit into almost any SF movement of the past fifty years, from the New Wave's artsy and meticulously structured ruminations on psychic influences and fate to the understated melancholy of ghost-story fantasy from the last decade. Alas, the central characters develop no life of their own. The narrator remains an Everyman, while Annie, seemingly dreaming the dreams of Robert E. Lee, is little more than a cipher, closed-lipped on any details of her own backstory. The lack of character leaves Lincoln's Dreams a technical and memorable achievement but, in my opinion, bloodless and insufficiently moving.

2014 read #96: The Chinese in America by Iris Chang.

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang
413 pages
Published 2003
Read from October 7 to October 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Nonfiction books in general, and histories in particular, are more difficult to assign some arbitrary grading metric than novels. I more or less weigh the quality and depth of the information provided against the dexterity of the presentation, including prose, editing, and illustrations. (Why editing? Well, when no one involved in the process of producing a major tome bothers to check if substantial portions of identical information or quotations are repeated in separate chapters, for example, as in Robert Hughes' Rome or W. B. Bartlett's Mongols, I see that as a significant detraction from the book as a whole.) A book can be excellently written but supply little in the way of new or interesting history, retreading the same old paths of European royalty and wars viewed from the winning rulers' perspective. The Chinese in America takes the opposite course, examining fascinating and entirely under-reported experiences and perspectives from the documents and oral histories of Chinese immigrants and American-Born Chinese, but presenting it in commonplace news-magazine prose. It's a readable mixture, and the material Chang covers is significant and essential (in large part because it has been almost universally ignored by mainstream history), but I do wish she'd avoided so many lazy truisms about seeking the American Dream.

2014 read #95: Dinosaurs, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.

Dinosaurs: Stories by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Many Others, edited by Martin H. Greenberg
295 pages
Published 1996
Read from September 30 to October 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5

I've wanted to read this book for nearly two decades, ever since I saw it in libraries and bookstores during the mid-'90s dinosaur boom. I was desperate for dinosaur fiction then, any dinosaur fiction, and this book was always tantalizingly out of my reach -- I saw it in a used bookstore, once, but didn't have the nerve to ask my father to begrudge three bucks for a book, and I never saw it again, through ensuing years of checking the shelves any chance I could. From the moment I set eyes on it after picking it up from my library's circulation desk, however, I knew I was in trouble. I mean, look at this fucking cover. It's an eyeball. With lens flare. A human eyeball. What does that have to do with dinosaurs? At all? I mean, I guess if you squinted it might resemble the jaw muscle of a theropod or something, but that's hardly clear. If you could only afford the stock art route, why not get the rights to something with a reptilian eyeball, or something with a scaly texture, or some ferns or something -- anything that isn't a human eyeball? That level of not giving a crap deflated my expectations, then ran over them in a truck.

"The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury (1951). I guess it was more important to get a story with Bradbury's byline than to make sure it was a good story. This is forgettable postwar pulp, a momentary encounter between a a lighthouse and a vaguely defined sort of plesiosaur-sauropod thing drawn by its foghorn. Bradbury's attempt to belabor pathos from the scene just makes it more awkward and embarrassing. Hard to believe this came from the same period when Bradbury produced "The Million-Year Picnic" and "All Summer in a Day."

"Day of the Hunters" by Isaac Asimov (1950). Ham-fisted ecological cautionary tale featuring an early appearance of the intelligent dinosaur civilization cliche (perhaps not yet a cliche at this point). The "strange inventor drowning his sorrows in liquor decides to tell his tale to the regulars" format is, as it always has been, a huge yawn.

"Dino Trend" by Pat Cadigan (1994). Pointless '90s silliness about fashionable nanotech and body modifications.

"Time's Arrow" by Arthur C. Clarke (1950). As soon as it was clear that top secret physics experiments were ongoing near a dinosaur trackway site, it was obvious how this was going to end. Heck, I even used a similar plot point -- excavators discover a human bone in Cretaceous strata -- in one of my early story attempts, around age 16, and felt pleased by my originality. An okay pulp story, probably would have made more of an impact around its time of publication than it does now.

"Chameleon" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1993). Middling, inoffensive urban fantasy, unremarkable except for the interesting idea that museum dinosaurs are receptacles for the unspoken fears, determination, and self-assertion of children, an imaginary costume to don when a kid needs to feel big. I liked that. Which, sad to say, kind of makes this my favorite story in the book so far.

"Shadow of a Change" by Michelle M. Sagara (1993). The problem with dinosaurs in fiction, aside from small clever touches like the museum receptacles in "Chameleon," is that there are only a few things writers know how to do with them, and every last one of those scenarios has been sucked dry. There's your time traveling tourists, hunters, and scientists; there's your ancient aliens and intelligent dinosaurs; there's your lost worlds and cloning experiments and theme parks and dinosaur circuses; there's the way dinos sometimes get tossed into an unrelated story as a background esthetic element; there's the perennial link between dinosaurs and the Old West and all the cliches about cowboys and Indians. And of course there are your "ordinary person turns into a dinosaur" stories. Ray Bradbury penned "Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?", for example, and there was the eminently forgettable "Dino Trends" in this very book. Michael Swanwick (naturally) outdid everyone with "Riding the Giganotosaur," rendering further attempts at the subject superfluous. (Imitating Swanwick, and trying to impress a furry I was into at the time, I produced a string of my own efforts around the turn of the millennium, with results no one, thankfully, ever need see.) If you try to forget all that, "Change" isn't bad, a slight rebellion-against-the-workaday-life piece -- I could see it, say, as filler in the late Subterranean magazine. Unlike many '90s stories, it doesn't feel embarrassingly dated. But it isn't all that noteworthy, either, especially in light of all the other stories that stomped and roared down this path, before and since.

"Strata" by Edward Bryant (1980). I like the idea of geological ghosts left over from the Cretaceous period, but this story does nothing with it. I'm kind of amazed at the number of '80s cliches this packs in: the down on his luck man coming home after the death of his Hollywood dreams, the Japanese man who is a cutthroat business wiz, the woman journalist out to bust the evil energy conglomerate, even a passing mention of Ghost Dances and magical natives. There are hints of a better story here, but they're buried like zircons in a Precambrian quartzite, reworked from something long gone.

"Green Brother" by Howard Waldrop (1982). Waldrop earned considerable benefits of the doubt with his story "God's Hooks!", still one of my favorite examples of purely audacious fantasy. The only other story of his I've read was "The Ugly Chickens," which was clever but only an average sci-fi story, in my opinion. All the same I remain optimistic whenever I see a Waldrop story, entirely on the strength of "God's Hooks!" This story, alas, was disappointing, a generic magic Indian story bringing nothing new to the standard "dinosaurs in the Old West" cliche. Perhaps the slight anachronistic tone to the dialogue was fresh at the time.

"Wildcat" by Poul Anderson (1978). Anderson, by contrast, has never impressed me. I enjoyed "Delenda Est" when I was a kid, but even back then I found the rest of Guardians of Time rather disappointing. Anything I've read of his as an adult has reminded me of the earnest, unoriginal stories that comprise the slush pile of any genre magazine, bland tales of Vikings and pastoral heroes firmly in the post-Tolkien mode. "Wildcat," unsurprisingly, is bog-standard blue collar pulp, pitting an no-nonsense man's man against a prissy stereotype of a career bureaucrat, who turns out to be not such a bad egg after all. Anderson's character beats have all the subtlety and finesse of a boy's adventure from the 1930s. The bright-eyed new recruit talks about his girl back home, sings cheerful songs, and gets squished by a dinosaur! Our square-jawed hero hits the bottle and lashes out against the corruption of the future and the futility of the past! Even Anderson's depiction of the Jurassic feels recycled from an earlier pulp era, a fog-bound world of swamps and dull-witted behemoths more suited to black and white serials than to the early years of the warmblooded revolution. It is an okay pulp story, if I'm being generous, but by 1978 sci-fi was capable of so much more.

"Just Like Old Times" by Robert J. Sawyer (1993). Transferring the consciousness of a human observer into a gigantic theropod -- Michael Swanwick did it best in "Riding the Giganotosaur" in 1999. This being the early '90s, however, the transferred consciousness is of course going to be that of a serial killer. The innate silliness and datedness of the premise sinks this story.

"The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi" by S. N. Dyer (1988). The Bone Wars between Edward Cope and O. C. Marsh are a perennial favorite source of dinosaur fiction. There's at least one terrible novel floating around out there with the title Bone Wars, which features robotic dinosaurs and ends in some silly business with a UFO or something. (I read a lot of shitty dinosaur novels as a teen. I am not proud of this.) This story is shallow but entertaining fun, a pulpy romp unhindered by any attempt to feign deep thoughts.

"Hatching Season" by Harry Turtledove (1985). Ah crap, a Turtledove story. There's no way this could be good. And yet... somehow... I don't hate this? It's as banal a "time traveling researcher must survive the Cretaceous" story as could be expected, yet it scratches, just a little bit, that dino adventure itch this whole book has only frustrated up to this point. Like Kraft mac and cheese, it's comforting junk.

"A Gun for Dinosaur" by L. Sprague de Camp (1956). Classic dinosaur hunt story, sturdy and enjoyable mid-century pulp adventure. I've read it before, so I don't have much to say about it now; it's not as if pulp adventures lend themselves to deep subtextual readings or anything, anyway.

"Our Lady of the Sauropods" by Robert Silverberg (1980). What tickled me most about this little story was the line, "After that unfortunate San Diego event with the tyrannosaur it became politically unfeasible to keep [dinosaurs] anywhere on earth" -- a full seventeen years before The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs maintained in an artificial Lagrangian point satellite were reconstructed from fossil DNA, while we're on the subject. And that's just the scene-setting for a tale about telepathic dinosaurs drawing a marooned researcher into metapsychic communion in order to instigate a dinosaurian conquest of the human world -- as clever a development as any I've seen in an "intelligent dinosaur" story.

And there we go. Three new stories I more or less liked -- "Our Lady of the Sauropods," "Hatching Season," "Chameleon" -- plus one story I already knew I liked, "A Gun for Dinosaur." And the rest... eh.

Not worth eighteen years of waiting.

2014 read #94: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
445 pages
Published 1992
Read from October 1 to October 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I avoid reading plot synopses or even dust jackets, partly out of spoiler phobia, partly out of a preference to go in to each book fresh and not knowing what to expect. I saw Doomsday Book on somebody's list of the best sci-fi books, knew it had something to do with time travel to the Middle Ages, and entertained vague ideas of swashbucklin' and the hovels of the peasantry, maybe a cruel aristocrat and some romancin' thrown in for funsies. The details didn't matter. I needed some time travel and Middle Ages in my life, and I didn't care what it brought me. I wasn't expecting the flu to be a critical plot point.

The '90s were the decade of the pandemic thriller: Outbreak, Hot Zone, probably more stuff I'm too lazy to look up or remember right now. Not one but two epidemics crowd the pages of Doomsday. Researchers excavating a tomb release an ancient flu strain, which impairs the time travel technician enough to (spoilers) send Kivrin right into the teeth of the Black Death by mistake. While Kivrin lies ill and bedridden through the first third of the novel, we readers are treated to thrilling sequences set in the present -- chapter upon chapter of wryly observed academic bureaucracy, overbearing mothers, unhelpful nurses, and countless attempts to track people down on the phone. It's a bold narrative choice, to be sure. Willis' prose is the saving factor, demonstrating the quality that I believe is referred to as "compulsively readable." The phone sequences can hardly be called riveting, but Willis keeps them painless.

An interesting question, despite the death of the author and so on, is why a given writer decided to tell a particular story in a certain way. Here, I kept wondering: why mix the modern pandemic narrative with the medieval time travel adventure? There's symmetry there, a disease in the present leading to human error which strands a researcher in the Black Death, no matter how contrived the source of the disease may seem, but what about this symmetry appealed to Willis as a storyteller? I have to wonder, because despite Willis' obvious strengths as a writer, the two stories she tells here seemed to me an awkward fit. The character of Father Roche is too enigmatic, unassuming, and saintly to carry his central thematic role -- we see too little of him as a person to really feel his declaration of faith restored, or his spiritual salvation by the Jesus/God figures of Kivrin/Dunworthy (clever as that parallel may be).