2023 read #141: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

Illustrated by Laurence Hausman (1890 edition)

51 pages

Published 1862

Read November 30

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I found this narrative poem tucked in at the end of a hefty collection of Victorian fantasy titled Beyond the Looking Glass (1973). I’d never heard of it before. My partner R, however, tells me that Goblin Market was the inspiration for Tori Bovalino’s Not Good for Maidens, which they enjoyed.

The 1973 introduction sums it up, in questionable '70s fashion, as "probably the most extreme and most beautifully elaborated example of repressed eroticism in children's literature." There's nothing explicit in here, of course, but it isn't subtle, either:

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She sucked until her lips were sore;

Then flung the empty rinds away

But gathered up one kernal-stone,

And knew not was it night or day

I'm skeptical that Market was actually intended for children. Much the way that contemporary fantasy by feminine writers (especially feminine writers of the global majority) is cordoned off into YA, my hunch is that any fantastical writing from a woman would have been packed off for the nursery by Victorian publishers. It seems, instead, that this narrative of frugivorous temptation was inspired by Rossetti's own experiences with erotic entanglement, and by her sister's support through the heartbreak. She wrote a "children's" poem, I think, because that was the market open to her.

I haven't much read much poetry from before the current century; rhyming couplets often feel too trite or precious. But Rossetti's language is unexpectedly hypnotic, breathing strange and perilous rhythms of sound throughout her tale.

Also mesmerizing: Laurence Hausman's art nouveau woodcuts that illustrate this edition. Fantastic stuff.

2023 read #140: A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils by Paul Kenrick.

A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils by Paul Kenrick

160 pages

Published 2020

Read November 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a coffee table book comprising photographs of plant fossils, each with a page or two of descriptive text linking it to some wider topic in botany, evolutionary history, and ecology. Make no mistake: I read this to inflate my book numbers. With a month left in the year, I’m pushing myself to read 150 books in 2023. Maybe even 153, which would break my adult record for most books in one year. (My all-time record, 183, which I hit as a teen in 1996 or 1997, is well beyond my present attention span.)

All that aside, this is a perfectly unremarkable introductory text for the reader who might be curious enough to visit a museum and actually read the placards, but hasn’t had a science class since high school. To illustrate the level of information in this book, the introduction begins: “It’s not easy being a plant.” It’s no Otherlands, but then again, it never set out to be.

The photographs, of course, are the main attraction. They’re frequently stunning, as fossils so regularly are. And this is a whole book of them. Can’t go wrong with that.

2023 read #139: The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt.

The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt

278 pages

Published 1931

Read from November 27 to November 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Who’s ready for a colonialist old dungeon crawl adventure from the early days of dark fantasy pulp? We got your ivory-skinned Atlantean princess, we got your winged serpents, we got your lizard people and your snake people and your spider people. We got your ancient evil giving orders and weeping gold through a stone face in a cavern. We got your shitty, all-pervasive racism and sexism. There’s even an evil garden! And mixed up in all of it, we got your standard interchangeable white dude, all effortless confidence and fisticuffs, trampling through the lost world, hoping to get the girl as a literal reward.

Today’s special boy is a lump of masculinity named Graydon, an American mining engineer recruited by adventurers to help steal hidden Incan gold. The group speed-runs The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in record time, with Graydon punching out professional adventurer Starrett by page 4, and the others drawing guns on Graydon by page 14. Graydon alienates his companions by rescuing the ivory-skinned Suanna from their clutches. Suanna, in turn, guides the adventurers into her Atlantean lost world, a hidden valley high in the Andes. Her people call themselves Yu-Atlanchi, but come on — it’s Atlantis.

In a pleasant surprise, the land of Yu-Atlanchi has dinosaurs! They aren’t scientifically rigorous dinosaurs by any means — even by the 1930s, only a pulp writer would amalgamate iguanodonts and theropods into one toothy, pointy-thumbed beast — but an elf-coded Atlantean in green, out hunting on dinosaur-back with a pack of dinosaurian game-hounds, was a pleasure I wasn’t expecting when I picked up this book. We’re also treated to a high-speed dinosaur race and a gladiator fight against a small theropod. Dinos don’t fill many pages here, but the mix of genres and vibes is exquisitely D&D-esque.

And really, the pulpy roots of D&D are what draw me to books like this. Wizards of the Coast alienated everyone with its shady business practices, its AI art, and its misplaced loyalty to racist old tropes. D&D was a huge part of my life for a number of years, though, and I’ll always be fond of the vibe. The titular Face itself could be a direct inspiration for the eidolon of Moloch, which graced the player’s handbook in the first edition of AD&D.

Merritt tosses so many elements into his pulp stew that sometimes it can’t help but be entertaining. It helps that his prose, while conventionally forgettable, is miles better than Edgar Rice Burroughs’. Ultimately, though, Face is predictably mired in the mores of its time, in its vile racial theory and foul gender norms. Fun it may be in spots, but that’s impossible to overlook.

2023 read #138: I Never Liked You Anyway by Jordan Kurella.

I Never Liked You Anyway, or: The Tale of Eurydice & Orpheus as Told by One God and One Musician by Jordan Kurella

165 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 25 to November 27

Rating: 4 out of 5

Small press releases are wildly uneven. My most frequent complaint is that many indie books could use more polish, whether that means an editorial once-over for prose that doesn’t flow, or a substantial restructuring to let the narrative breathe. Which is why it’s particularly delightful to read an indie fantasy novel written with this much verve and style.

I Never Liked You Anyway is, as you might have guessed, a postmodern interpretation of the story of Eurydice and Orpheus. We meet them as thoroughly modern college students, orbiting each other in the music department, but their contemporary vibe is augmented by gods and fate and ghosts. Hades can’t get enough of the hot dogs Persephone brings down for him. Orpheus is the most popular student in the department because he carries the favor of Apollo. Eurydice is young and starstruck and gets manipulated by the budding wunderkind, kept under his thumb, her music co-opted. And then she is killed, and her real journey begins, because even the Afterlife is a college of sorts.

Kurella’s prose skill goes far beyond many mainstream fantasists I could name, and his adaptation of Greek mythology is as inventive and fluent as any retelling I’ve read from an author outside of Greece. (Contemporary Greek authors, of course, are doing astounding things with their own myths and folklore.) The story is vibrant and angry and propulsive. Even if you’re skeptical of small press offerings, this one is a must-read.

2023 read #137: Forest Walking by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst.

Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst

206 pages

Published 2022 (some portions originally published as Gebrauchsanweisung für den Wald in 2017, translated by Jane Billinghurst)

Read from November 24 to November 25

Rating: 3 out of 5

I received this book from my partner R for Yule last year, and it's been migrating up and down my to-read stack ever since. It’s the perfect time of year for a read like this, though. Late November is when the forest winds down for the year. Even when atmospheric carbon makes for 80⁰F days, the leaves are mostly gone, the few that remain plinko-ing down bare branches. It's a time to think of spring, to meditate on the life that we (as a species) have not yet managed to eradicate.

This book is shallower than I’d hoped, but charming nonetheless. It rambles through sensory experience, brief anecdote, and science tidbit, very much like a gentle walk through the woods. It’s clearly directed at a general audience, the sort of readers who maybe have a vague fondness for nature but haven't spent much time in forest themselves. The “In Closing” section summarizes Walking as an “appetizer.”

I can’t tell whether it’s because of this intended audience, because of translation, or because most of the book is written in second person, but at times Walking’s voice is reminiscent of 1950s primers for young readers. Here’s a sample line: “Does it sound odd to you that tree roots breathe?” There’s just a smidgen of “kindly uncle welcoming the nieces and nephews to the family cabin” condescension in there. (I recently got a copy of my childhood staple, The Stars by H. A. Rey, so perhaps that’s why the 1950s association is so vivid right now.) The result isn’t as informative as one might hope from the subtitle, but makes a nice way to wile away the dim hours after November sunset.

2023 read #136: The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale.

The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale

275 pages

Published 2016

Read from November 21 to November 24

Rating: 3 out of 5

Yet another book I learned about thanks to the Prehistoric Pulps blog. This one is a trio of novellas connected only by their setting: a weird western world of witchcraft, where alchemical tampering has opened rifts and allowed Cretaceous dinosaurs — and sea levels — to pour out all over the planet.

The Long Past is a fine small press outing, one of the better works of dinosaur fiction I’ve come across. Unfortunately, it hails from what I've dubbed the Wake of Vultures era: when we well-meaning white progressives appointed ourselves the voice for the disenfranchised global majority in the fight against racism. White progressives absolutely must address racism in our fiction. But volunteering to tell a more marginalized group’s experiences with racism has so many ways it could go wrong: lack of nuance, unconsciously utilizing stereotypes, white saviorism, crowding out titles from writers of color. It isn’t up to me to say whether Hale avoided these pitfalls.

The titular novella is the tale of Grover, a trapper in coastal Colorado, who gets drawn into a magical conflict with global stakes when Lawrence, his former friend and lover who happens to be an elemental mage, reappears. At almost 150 pages, one could argue that “The Long Past” is actually a short novel. My favorite bits were Hale’s descriptions of how the Cretaceous ecology has interwoven with the West: stray Tenontosaurus graze in buffalo herds, Quetzalcoatlus hunts mountain goats, magnolia infiltrates groves of aspen. Hale makes an effort (not fully consistent, but appreciated nonetheless) to make her prehistoric fauna identifiable without employing names scientists invented after 1864. Grover, for example, rides a big “ridingbird” he raised from a chick. It’s a nice, plausible folk name for an ornithomimid (though the rationale gets fuzzy when Lawrence marvels that no one else had thought to tame and ride one before).

“The Long Past” also benefits from having a sweeter, more erotic, and more believable relationship at its heart than, say, “The Virgin and the Dinosaur” did.

The much shorter middle novella, “The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus,” moves the scene almost thirty years later, after free magic has been banned throughout most of the United States. The magic necessary for modern living is conducted by captive mages held in electric collars. Our narrator Ashni is an underground mage who makes her living in Chicago with a fake magic show, which she performs via an automaton dubbed Professor Perfectus. If you think that all sounds a long way away from dinosaurs, you’d be correct. “History” is all about misogyny, magic lobotomies, steampunk police drones, and the horrors concocted by the American white supremacist Christian patriarchy in every timeline. The story also touches on how white feminists mostly want to look after themselves, and make unreliable allies at best to women of the global majority.

Worthy material and a solid story, shocking and memorable on its own, but perhaps not the clearest follow-up to “The Long Past.” Lack of dinosaurs aside, though, “History” might be the strongest story in this collection.

We wrap things up with “Get Lucky,” which features more dinosaurs than “History,” but not by much. Our hero faces more danger from a jellyfish than from any dino. “Lucky” is a serviceable yarn about a young man (named Lucky) who happens to rescue the man who’d once promised to run away with him before disappearing three years before. A borax fortune is involved. The two of them must escape the clutches of the patrician Swaim brothers along the shores of Illinois’ Inland Sea.

After the previous stories, it was something of a shock that Hale made one of her “Lucky” protagonists a Pinkerton agent. A heroic Pinkerton agent, no less. That wasn’t very social justice-y of her; it cooled a lot of my enthusiasm for the story.

2023 read #135: The Sky People by S. M. Stirling.

The Sky People by S. M. Stirling

301 pages

Published 2006

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I remember seeing this book on display at Borders shortly after its release. Dinosaurs! Right there on the cover! And in hardback, no less. (Hardback sci-fi imparted a cachet of quality to my naive younger self. Thirteen years of mass market paperbacks will do that to a budding sci-fi fan.) When I flipped through the prologue, though, I got discouraged by Stirling’s Burroughsian pastiche, and never picked it up again. Soon enough, I forgot it even existed.

Once again I have the Prehistoric Pulps blog to thank for bringing this book to my attention. Their review warns that this is a “by-the-numbers” Old Venus adventure novel, and that dinosaurs are mere “window dressing” without any substantial role. But I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for more dinosaur fiction, and in the years since I first spotted The Sky People in the wild, I’ve come to a much finer appreciation for modern takes on Old Venus and Old Mars. (Hell, I even published one.) How does People suit my current sensibilities?

It’s… not great? Stirling is a journeyman sci-fi writer who tends to throw away the promise of his pulpy setups with forgettable storytelling. He hits that elusive note of mediocrity that’s so hard to push through (or care about); somehow he makes a perilous airship journey through skies beset with predatory pterosaurs feel flat and uninteresting. Marauding Neanderthals armed with AK-47s are somehow monotonous. The dinosaurs, moreover, feel more like big, dumb, lumbering, lethargic beasts here than they did in Time Safari, which was published 24 years before.

On top of that, Stirling has that white-guy-who-came-up-in-the-’90s attitude toward his characters’ race. He’ll make a Black woman one of his main characters, and act like he’s being progressive, but then have her spend the book constantly thinking about or referencing how dark-skinned she is. “I’m not equipped to blanch, but consider it done,” says our Cynthia. This could also serve as an example of Stirling’s skills with witty and naturalistic dialogue. Later, we learn the indigenous Venusians have christened her “Night Face.” This tendency in Stirling’s work is pretty glaring.

The main problem with updating a Burroughsian pulp vibe without deconstructing the Burroughsian pulp vibe is, your narrative can feel laden with a 1900s colonialist mentality. In the author’s note to some other book he wrote, Stirling chided his readers not to conflate what a character thinks with what the author thinks, which is a fine philosophy, but doesn’t justify choosing to write a square-jawed protagonist who advises his protégés to gun down “threatening” locals without compunction.

2023 read #134: Time Safari by David Drake.

Time Safari by David Drake

278 pages

Published 1982

Read from November 13 to November 15

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I didn’t expect great things going into this pulpy fix-up. I learned about it through a review on the Prehistoric Pulp blog, which offered at least marginal encouragement, calling it “a fun little book.” But the tagline on the back cover — “Hot blooded dinosaurs and cold-blooded women don’t mix on Time Safari” — was unappetizing, to say the least.

Safari glues together three novellas: “Calibration Run,” which deposits our manly hunter Vickers with a small team in the Pliocene Levant; “Time Safari,” an expansion of a story originally published in 1981; and “Boundary Layer,” which inevitably brings our heroes to the end-Cretaceous extinction — or, rather, our heroes bring extinction to the Cretaceous. 

We make it seven pages into “Calibration” before Linda Weil, team paleontologist and medic, must politely discourage some sexual harassment from a married man in the time-camp. (Later, this married man calls her a slut. Because that’s the kind of book we’re dealing with here.) Somehow Drake’s narration is even more ammosexual than L. Sprague de Camp’s in “A Gun for Dinosaur,” which was Drake’s obvious inspiration. Guns and calibers receive more description than poor Linda Weil does.

“Calibration” is some silly melodrama about Linda Weil wanting to catch a hominid to take back to the modern era for study, and the clash of personalities within their team at the news. Drake's descriptions of the Pliocene are pretty good. The story has some nice little details, like the hominid group foraging honey from a hive. However, “Calibration” is loaded with antiquated assumptions of hominid behavior: the males are providing for everyone else, led by a single alpha male, etc. Modern woman Weil, by contrast, is depicted as willing to endanger their future timeline in her eagerness to prove herself. Conscious or not, the juxtaposition reveals something about the author’s attitudes.

The Late Cretaceous “Safari” maintains a similar mix of well-described paleo-environments and dubious old gender norms. It has a stock complement of characters for a dino-hunt tale: the arrogant rich guy; his dissatisfied wife, Adrienne, who makes eyes at the guides; the pair who only want to take photographs; and so forth. It’s nothing de Camp wouldn’t write five times over in the early ’90s.

At least the dinosaurs are interesting. This might be the earliest story I’ve ever read that featured a pack of sickle-clawed raptors (here referred to properly as dromaeosaurs, because Jurassic Park hadn’t popularized “raptors” yet). The rest of the Cretaceous fauna is consistent with the early years of the Dinosaur Renaissance. The smallest theropods even sport feathers! The dinos, alas, rarely get more than a moment to shine before Vickers and his crew blast them to smithereens. (Literally — someone brought a grenade launcher.)

If you thought the “Safari” would not end with Vickers and the newly widowed Adrienne fucking immediately after her husband and a bunch of other people died in the jaws of theropods, you don’t know what kind of book this is.

The final segment, “Boundary,” gets deep into the weeds with its geopolitics plot — Israel and the Arab states are on the brink of a nuclear war, a proxy front where the Cold War threatens to turn hot. At this distance, it’s hard to tease apart the mainstream 1982 American zeitgeist from specific antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes the author might have held. Why is any of this in a book about manly men gunning down dinosaurs? Well, you see — I don’t care enough to type it out. The point is, I didn’t like the vibe of this part of the story. It reminded me too much of Dan Simmons’ Olympos. Was this just how Americans thought things stood in the balance at the time? Maybe. I wasn’t quite born yet, so I don't know.

It was around this part of the book that I realized: this is that David Drake. The Vietnam vet who squeezed a career out of military sci-fi and collaborated with John Ringo. Yikes.

The rationale for the Arab vs Israeli plot is to draw an obvious parallel between Mutually Assured Destruction and the extinction of the dinosaurs. (It was so obvious, I typed that sentence the moment nuclear weapons were mentioned, and never needed to edit it.) In their desperation to placate the asshole who’s currently the American Secretary of State, here on special invitation from the Israeli Prime Minister, Vickers and Adrienne inadvertently introduce the pathogen that destroys the dinosaurs. The connection is clumsy and doesn’t make for a satisfying story, but it’s there.

This book could have been so much better without the relentless slaughter and the ham-fisted attempts at geopolitical commentary. But since that’s like 85% of the book, there isn’t much to salvage.

2023 read #133: Dinosaur Fantastic, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg.

Dinosaur Fantastic, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg

331 pages

Published 1993

Read from November 11 to November 13

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

In the introduction, editor Resnick claims this is the first anthology devoted to all-new dinosaur fiction, which I suppose could be technically correct — The Ultimate Dinosaur came out the year before, but featured a single reprinted story (and was 50% essays, besides).

Four of these stories would be reprinted three years later in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs anthology. None of the four was especially good, or so I thought when I read that book, so I’ve been iffy about the chances of the rest. But I’m on a dino roll, so let’s try it out!

“Just Like Old Times” by Robert J. Sawyer. Not only did this piece reappear in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs, it also got recycled into the Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology. For a story that is nothing more than 1990s psycho-killer pap, it’s gotten a lot of mileage for Sawyer. I’ve read and reviewed it too many times already. I’ll say this about it: meh. C-

“Disquisitions on the Dinosaur” by Robert Sheckley. This is a “humorous” yarn about Emperor Nero being forced to host an anachronistic infestation of dinosaurs. It tries really hard to channel Mel Brooks and instead just falls flat on its face somewhere in the vicinity of S. P. Somtow’s godawful Aquiliad stories. Worth no one’s time. F

This anthology is already starting to feel like a slog.

“Dino Trend” by Pat Cadigan. Another one that would get reprinted in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. As you’d expect from Cadigan, it’s a bauble about urban hipsters in a nanotech future, who play out the ending scenes of their relationship while cosmetic creams that turn you into a dinosaur hit the market. It’s fine. C

“The Greatest Dying” by Frank M. Robinson. A forgettable post-Jurassic Park pandemic piece. What if amber, instead of preserving dino DNA, preserved a virus that had killed off the dinosaurs? Spends too much of its runtime sketching a summary of the asteroid extinction theory instead of, you know, establishing its characters or telling its own story. Maybe D+

“Revenants” by Judith Tarr. A mother brings her four-year-old to the extinct animal petting zoo. This is her one day this month with her daughter, who lives with her father in an Atavist preserve, cosplaying the Ice Age. A few clever details are sprinkled here and there in the story: “She was wearing pants I’d bought for her, and a shirt with a hologram on it, one of the Lascaux cave paintings.” It would be a more enjoyable story if it weren’t, at its heart, a snide satire against family services “overreach.” (As an abused kid ignored by the system in the ’90s, I can only roll my eyes.) I’d much rather read an inverted version of this story, with a single mother hunting bear in an Ice Age preserve, having to host her city-girl daughter for a weekend. C+

“One Giant Step” by John E. Stith. This rote little tale of saurian time travelers arriving 65 million years before modern civilization, only for one of them to trigger a mass extinction in order to give a worthier lineage the opportunity to evolve (and to not poison the Earth in the future), feels very 1960s to me. It has a sort of white people nihilism at its foundation, a conceit that any intelligent species is going to be ecologically destructive and bigoted (even though only white people have made those activities the centerpieces of our culture). D

“Last Rights” by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. This is, somehow, my first exposure to Lackey. Unfortunately, it’s a lazy satire about bleeding heart liberals turned animal liberationists, who take it upon themselves to liberate dinosaurs from a genetic engineering facility. Watch the silly little liberals get picked off one by one! I’ll pass. F

“After the Comet” by Bill Fawcett. A herd of psychic Triceratops tries to survive in the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact. This is an overlong retread of a standard theme; its only innovation — psychic dinosaur herd — is just goofy. D-

“Rex Tremandae Majestatis” by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg. Out of everything on the table of contents, I was most curious about this one. Malzberg, of course, wrote “Major League Triceratops” in The Ultimate Dinosaur, a story which utilized elliptical literary prose to disguise the fact that it had nothing to say. My only prior exposure to Koja was “La Reine d’Enfer,” one of the more stylish and interesting stories in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. Apparently the two authors were frequent collaborators. This piece, sadly, hews closer to Malzberg’s “Major League” than to Koja’s “Reine.” We begin with a heterosexual encounter so tawdry and unsatisfying that Leona, our POV, imagines the guy as a stegosaur. Leona’s ex-husband writes out in LA for a cartoon called Dino Dudes. Dinosaurs and extinction run through the piece as metaphors for divorce, entropy, a death-wish, the ennui and malaise of modern suburbia. Like, it’s fine enough. But also kind of an elaborate literary shrug. Of the two tales so far that use dinosaurs as symbols of divorce and single motherhood, I preferred “Revenants” by a hair. C+

“The Skull’s Tale” by Katharine Kerr. Rare is the story of sentient dinosaurs that feels as alien as it should. This brief number manages to distinguish itself with its cadence and its sensory emphasis on smell. Though, like all too many stories here, it’s clear that no actual research went into its portrayal of the Mesozoic. C+

“Cutting Down Fred” by Dean Wesley Smith. This one is bizarre, but sadly not in any entertaining way. An acorn marinated in spunk from a used condom grows into a majestic oak named Fred, who can telepathically communicate with those who linger beneath it. When our narrator tries to indulge his girlfriend’s exhibitionist inclinations beneath Fred, Fred beams raunchy limericks into their brains. Girlfriend promptly breaks up with narrator, narrator hopes to prove Fred is to blame, but the city plans to cut Fred down, etc. Then we swerve into Fred telling our narrator that oaks have ancestral memories, and would he like to experience the Cretaceous? The Cretaceous incident, scarcely more than a paragraph, is almost certainly a throwaway addition to get “Fred” on theme and help Smith sell a trunk story, a story that would've been close to unsellable even in the swingin’ ’90s. I cannot over-emphasize how little that interlude has to do with the rest of “Fred.” Well, I guess you can’t spell Fred without F

“Shadow of a Change” by Michelle M. Sagara. Another story that I first read reprinted in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. Another story that, like the Koja and Malzberg joint, uses dinosaurs as a metaphor for modern discontent, of having no control over what happens to you in the workaday world. It isn’t bad. C+

“Wise One’s Tale” by Josepha Sherman. Wise One, a venerable pterosaur, tells young ones the tale of Quick Trickster, the hero who won pterosaurs their wings from Fire Being. A standard (albeit perfunctory) fable of three challenges overcome through trickery. C

“Curren’s Song” by Laura Resnick. Curren is a special boy, nephew of the king. Curren is also cursed with visions of the future, which his people don't appreciate. When a stranger named Columba arrives to preach Christianity, Curren flees. But naturally a girl his age appreciates him, and she hangs out with him to hear his visions. Even she, however, is disturbed by the "song" he hears from the ancient beings who swim in Loch Ness. As a story, it's a bit flimsy, little more than an extended mood piece. It's fine? C

“Whilst Slept the Sauropod” by Nicholas A. DiChario. The town of Sleepy Mountain flourishes at the foot of a mountain-size sauropod, until the sauropod leaves one day and inadvertently leads the town to discovering the modern world. It's an engaging setup (“The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” but make it a brontosaur) for what turns out to be a boilerplate fable about how hustle and bustle corrupt paradise, and how honest hard work is what the hip people are into these days. C+

“Rex” by David Gerrold. We begin with a charming new spin on Jurassic Park — the Filltree family’s basement holds the finest miniature dinosaur zoo in Westchester, or at least it did before they added the two-foot-high T. rex to the terrarium — but the charm is lost because our POV Jonathan is a manly suburbanite who resents his spoiled daughter Jill and nagging wife Joyce. The story revolves around his resentments, which creep into violent fantasies. Caging the miscreant rex on the porch upsets Jill, for example, and Jonathan “wondered if he’d locked up the right animal.” It’s all more or less in that vein. It ends with Jonathan tacitly deciding to murder his family via miniature tyrannosaur. The straights really aren’t okay, huh? Oh well. This story really could have been something. F

“The Pangaean Principle” by Jack Nimersheim. Amateurish character work and implausible dialogue dominate this forgettable piece about a Russian geneticist getting lost in his dino DNA, and alienating his precious daughter in the process. I suppose the fact that this father doesn’t decide to murder his kid is a step up from the previous story, but still, there just wasn’t much to salvage here. F+

“On Tiptoe” by Beth Meacham. A peep at the unappealing mediocrity of heteronormativity from the other direction. Our narrator’s old college roommate, Alice, arrives in New York City for a visit. With her camera, Alice inadvertently discovers dinosaurs with chameleon abilities (or so she believes) hiding all over Manhattan. Instead of having any kind of reaction to this news, our narrator gets jealous when Alice partners up with mildly attractive museum researcher Matt. Our narrator suspects that Matt is just humoring Alice to get into Alice’s pants. And instead of communicating any of this, our narrator gets excited about helping Matt get over Alice. Truly bizarre stuff. F+

“Betrayal” by Susan Casper. As a youth, Eldon encountered a magical liopleurodon mosasaur in a sea cave, and for a while afterward, he seemed to lead a charmed life. But he blames the magical liopleurodon mosasaur when things go wrong, and betrays her by revealing her to the world. When he doesn’t get the fame and notoriety he believes is his due, he breaks into the aquarium the state has built around her, and shoots her. As with “Cutting Down Fred,” I have a hunch that this was a trunk story, almost certainly about a mermaid, which Casper fudged into a mosasaur for this anthology. (Mosasaurs don’t leap to mind on the list of magical mythical beings, after all. Not like liopleurodons.) At least this story has a decent level of prose skill, so I’ll give it a D-

“’Saur Spot” by Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Sci-fi writers in the ’80s and ’90s really fantasized that the big bad government was gonna regulate them to death, didn’t they? “Damn the EPA!” one character bewails here. In a dystopian future where boric acid requires a permit, and books are read on an electronic tablet, Gideon Cope is an old man who wants a tiny pet dinosaur to help manage his roach problem. That’s pretty much the whole story. D-

“Pteri” by Lea Hernandez. Out of nowhere, we have a premise that’s actually interesting: Gelesse is a witch whose familiar is a pterosaur named Pret. The setting is interesting too, a contemporary fantasy where one can get a degree in the Craft from a state university. Gelesse tells us the tale of how she Called her familiar after several failed attempts. The story is slight, and could very well have been about any other kind of animal — a crow would have made as much sense as a pterosaur — but I appreciate it after the last few garbage tales. At least a C+

“Chameleon” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The last of the stories that I first encountered in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. This one was the best of that bunch, a tale of a grade schooler bullied for being a crybaby and a witch, who discovers that museum dinosaurs are the repositories of the hopes, wishes, and fears that children project onto them. She gains some measure of self-determination from this, imagining herself as a big green dinosaur. It doesn’t have much at all to do with dinos in the end, but it’s a competent story. B-

“Fellow Passengers” by Barbara Delaplace. An artifact from the 1990s: our narrator is a reporter for a Weekly World News-style tabloid. The narration is a pastiche of 1940s hardboiled reporter patter, which is mildly amusing given the context. She’s sent on assignment to check out rumors of strange livestock deaths, and discovers that some kind of theropod is on the loose. It’s a featherweight story, but not awful, which counts for a lot in a book like this. When the Deinonychus is captured, and our reporter watches it in the zoo, it just might be the most vivid dinosaur in the entire anthology. But of course we must endure another ’90s artifact: the return of naive animal liberationists. All the same, this story wasn’t bad. C+

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dinosaur” by Gregory Feeley. As if ashamed to commit to writing a story about dinosaurs, Feeley couches several potential stories in an essay of sorts, attempting to wring some idea of why dinosaurs are popular in the public imagination from various dino story tropes. A couple of the ideas could have made for interesting stories — more interesting than most of what we got in this book — but Feeley would rather skip the storytelling to offer facile assertions like “It is preadolescent boys who like dinosaurs, just as preadolescent girls may develop an interest in horses…. Girls want to ride horses, but boys want to be dinosaurs.” And again: “Perhaps the dinosaur’s popularity derives from its power as a symbol of boisterous male energies in a post-chauvinist society.” I suppose we could test that assertion if we ever attained a post-chauvinist society, maybe? Presumably a post-chauvinist society could begin once we admit that social expectations pressure children to like what is “appropriate” for their assigned gender, instead of assuming “boys like this, girls like that” is somehow meaningful. Much like this anthology in miniature, “Thirteen Ways” is a gallery of wasted potential. D

“Evolving Conspiracy” by Roger MacBride Allen. One last 1990s classic for the road: conspiracy theories! A conspiracy by the devil to make people believe in evolution, no less. It’s supposed to be funny. I didn’t really care. Thirty years later, we have enough problems with broken-brained Q cultists imagining the devil is leading child sacrifices in pizza parlor basements. The paranoid style of American politics rises triumphant. It just isn’t that funny anymore. F

And that’s it! Damn, that was a slog.

It’s funny that all these authors took such pains to avoid the “A Gun for Dinosaur” / Jurassic Park cliché — modern human beings encountering realistic dinosaurs in a survival narrative — that the effort to avoid it feels like a new cliché itself. We had five or six stories of people turning into dinos; six more stories of sentient dinos; three stories of miniature dino pets; two stories that use dinosaurs as a direct metaphor for the pressure and disconnect of modern urban civilization. Some of these stories were even adequately entertaining. But when 90% of what you want from a dino story is human characters encountering, surviving, running from, dying from, or befriending well-researched dinosaurs, this book is a tremendous (though unsurprising) disappointment.

2023 read #132: Dinosaur Planet Survivors by Anne McCaffrey.

Dinosaur Planet Survivors by Anne McCaffrey

295 pages

Published 1984

Read from November 10 to November 11

Rating: 1 out of 5

Somehow, six years elapsed between the publication of Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors. The first Planet ended halfway through its story, a cliffhanger which found our heroes entering cryogenic sleep to wait out the heavyworlder mutiny that had ended their survey of the mysterious world. Six years is a surprisingly long turnaround time, given how little care McCaffrey put into the original book (which, until I had the misfortune of reading The Land that Time Forgot, was the worst dinosaur novel I’d ever read). You’d think she could have tossed off a conclusion in six months if she wanted to. Does any sign of effort make its way into the belated sequel?

Forty-three years have elapsed since the heavyworlder mutiny. Our bland protagonists Varian and Kai are awakened from cold-sleep by a Federation alien whose only interest is recovering ancient survey equipment from millions of years ago. That secured, it abandons them again. Soon, the survivors learn that the heavyworlders have proliferated for two generations, building a violent and muscle-bound society of dinosaur hunters in loincloths. And the colony has extended an invitation to space pirates to come settle and bolster their gene pool.

Dinosaur hunters! Space pirates! Sounds like it should, at the very least, be some silly pulpy fun, right?

Nah.

Most of the same issues I had with Planet persist here. Varian, the supposed animal lover, wants her sacrifice to mean something — as in, she desperately wants the Federation to swoop in and stripmine the prehistoric planet, which the narrative somehow construes as virtuous, even while it disparages how the heavyworlders are “raping” the planet. Weird eugenicist vibes continue, but honestly that’s true of most sci-fi written by certain generations. Same with the “I can’t help but respect industrious colonists” shit.

Worst of all, there continues to be a dearth of dinosaurs on this planet. We don’t get any kind of dinosaur encounter until page 62, and even then our viewpoint Varian is flying around observing the action. Somehow that’s the closest engagement we get with dinosaurs in the entire duology. We spend more pages discussing the bad taste of a medicinal moss than we do encountering dinosaurs. Rather than the mineral prospecting that filled the first book, here the bulk of the narrative shifts to wrangling over which group has the “lawful” claim to the planet, which is exactly as riveting as it sounds. Survivors is relentlessly dull — which is quite an accomplishment for a book that promises a literal planet full of dinosaurs.

The best I can say is that McCaffrey’s prose might be like 5% better here than it was in Planet. Survivors still reads like a starships-and-jetpacks chapter book, or maybe one of the lesser Star Wars expanded universe novels; it would take just a few tweaks to turn this into Young Jedi Adventures: Marooned on Dagobah! (That hypothetical book probably would've been more entertaining, actually.) Overall, though, there’s less technobabble and fewer acronyms thrown in to make it sound science-fictiony. Not much of an improvement, but it was appreciated.

2023 read #131: Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker.*

Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker*

260 pages

Published 1995

Read from November 8 to November 9

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

For an embarrassingly long time — from late 1996 until maybe the close of 1998, which felt like a geological era to a teen living in a car — this was my favorite book.

I first read it in stolen chapters, a 13 year old engrossed in the paperback aisle at Kroger or Meijer. It had a chokehold on my adolescent imagination. Bakker was already a childhood hero of mine; Raptor Red made me fantasize about collaborating with him on sequels, spin-offs, an extended dino fic universe. The very first story I sent to a professional sci-fi magazine, which I mailed with SASE to Asimov’s Science Fiction in the summer of 1998, was original-character fanfic of Raptor Red. Even when I was 18, long after Dinosaur Summer and other books had supplanted Raptor Red as my official “favorite,” I was active in Raptor Red roleplay groups on Yahoo. (For that matter, my Yahoo email address — which I used for everything email related until I was 25 or so — was a reference to this book.)

I don’t think I’ve reread it since I was 16 or 17. My tastes changed; I grew up. I always carried fondness for Red, but I likely always suspected a revisit could never live up to the memory. I’ve tried to get into it a handful of times over the last couple years, but the first chapter — awkward, amateurish, preciously titled “Raptor Attack!” — always made me cringe and put the book aside.

As befits a novel written by a scientist, Raptor Red doesn’t know what it wants to be. The prose would be at home in a children's chapter book, but the story is soaked in gore and revolves around mating; the book was marketed under an adult imprint to cash in on Jurassic mania. Parts of it read like Bakker was channeling a nature documentary, others like he was penning anthropomorphic action stars. His dinos tend to be more science fiction than science. Jurassic Park’s raptors were inspired by Bakker’s outspokenly “heretical” interpretation of theropods (with an assist from Gregory Paul, who lumped Deinonychus into the genus Velociraptor), so it’s no surprise that Red and her kin are implausibly brainy, slasher-flick-efficient pack hunters.

It’s a reminder that, even as a scientist, Bakker’s main skill has always been capturing the imagination of the public. The narrative, especially in the early going, constantly teeters between Red's adventures and Bakker's pocket sketches of then-current scientific concepts. The text is crammed with Discovery Channel-ready sound bites: “Darwinian blitzkrieg,” “Ginsu-knife claws,” “claws like Gurkha daggers,” “Darwinian Lizzie Bordens.”

And then there is the onomatopoeia. My god, so much onomatopoeia: “Ghurk-snurg-GULP.” “Sssnnnrrhht!” “GrrrrRRRRRRRRR — OOOP!” “HsssscreeeeEEEEEEECH!!!!”

Ah, the 1990s. Truly, this book would never have seen the light of day in any other decade.

Once I persevered through the opening cringe, the mix of childish and grisly became more endearing. Or, at any rate, my nostalgia neurons muffled my inner critic with vague fondness. I don’t think anyone would ever say, in retrospect, that this book is good. But we’ll probably never get a better-informed dinosaur novel. Bakker’s Early Cretaceous is evocative and detailed, even if the descriptions get a bit clunky. The chapters along the beach and in the snowy mountains, in particular, have been lodged in my imagination for almost three decades, percolating through my own dino stories. I'm happy I finally revisited Red and her pack.

2023 read #130: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas.

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

345 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 5 to November 8

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Young Beatriz lost her father when the first emperor of Mexico was overthrown; he was dragged before the firing squad for collaborating with Iturbide. When Beatriz, hoping for stability and safety, gets engaged to Rodolfo, a man high up in the party that executed her father, her mother disowns her. Beatriz has nowhere else to go but Hacienda San Isidro, her new husband’s estate. She is determined to make the hacienda hers, to assume its command as lady of the house, to leave her mark. But she quickly learns that not all is what it should be beneath the surface of San Isidro. And rumors swirl regarding the fate of Rodolfo’s first wife.

A classic Gothic plot set in Mexico, The Hacienda inevitably draws comparisons to Mexican Gothic. But the two are quite different. No mind-controlling mushrooms here. In their place is a world of witchcraft, possession, and hidden murders. There’s forbidden pining between Beatriz and Andrés, the young priest (and secret witch) whom she begs to cleanse the hacienda. It’s a more conventional Gothic business, but a satisfying novel all the same. Cañas’ descriptions are evocative, full of the sweep of the storm-shadowed countryside, and the claustrophobic terrors of possessed home and colonialist social hierarchies alike.

2023 read #129: Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2000 issue.

Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2000 issue (24:2)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

144 pages

Published 2000

Read from November 3 to November 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

As with the March 2000 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I read a fragment of this issue when it was on newsstands at my local Barnes & Noble. I was 17 and had a handful of story rejections to my name. Some had been rough; at least one had been sorta encouraging. Of the stories, about 75% had been about dinosaurs. I wanted to regroup: read what was getting published, see what professional short fiction looked like, improve my craft. Basically, scope out the competition and take notes.

This issue just happened to have a dinosaur story in it, so that was the story I read. All these years later, that dino story is the reason I tracked down a copy of this issue to read in full today.

“The Royals of Hegn” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s funny that at 17 I bypassed a Le Guin story to get to a dino fic, but as a teen I was rarely allowed to read anything more recent than the Edwardian era; I don’t believe I even recognized her name at the time. I wouldn’t read any of her books until I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness around ’07. If “Hegn” had been my first exposure to Le Guin, it’s possible my teenage self would not have been impressed. It’s a droll, satirical affair set in an island kingdom where the population is so small, and so interrelated, that almost everyone is an aristocrat or king in some way. All of these royals are obsessed with the doings of the single family of inbred commoners. (Keep in mind, for context, Princess Diana’s televised funeral would have been less than two years before this was penned.) Even an indifferent Le Guin will be worthwhile, and I always appreciate a middle finger to the institutions of power, but this was not her best effort. Maybe C+

A poem follows: “The Latest Literary Device” by Timons Esaias. It worked well enough, though it housed a better poem in its heart, blunted by its ironic “device.”

“How Josiah Taylor Lost His Soul” by L. Timmel Duchamp. One of my pet peeves as a reader and writer of SFFH is when mainstream literary authors swoop in, write a book rooted in a vintage SFFH premise, and get lauded for their originality. Don’t get me wrong — I loved Never Let Me Go. But here it is in miniature, five full years before Kazuo Ishiguro released it to acclaim, awards nominations, and movie deals. Josiah Taylor is a hardline Christian CEO who’s making the leap to a senate seat. He has at his disposal a small army of clones for whenever he needs, or wants, to replace a body part. Conveniently for Taylor’s theology, clones are considered “soulless” second-order creations. Our viewpoint is a clone designated Ezekiel, who strains to overcome his loyalty modifications to aid a plot to murder and replace Josiah. Okay, so it isn’t the same story as Never Let Me Go. This is less about the fragility and fleeting beauties of a life lived as spare parts for someone else, and more about dosed hormones, bloodlust, and inconvenient erections. No one would ever say it’s on the same stratum as Never Let Me Go. But it’s a solid enough take on an already thoroughly explored trope. C

A poem: “Technoghosts” by Ruth Berman. Can you imagine a more turn-of-the-millennium title? It’s a comedic little number about vengeful ghosts updating how they get in touch with you.

CW for the next story for sexualization of a child.

“Downriver” by James Sarafin. After a confrontation between Alaska Natives and the federal government leaves Anchorage (and 40% of Alaska’s population) destroyed, Ed, a hunting lodge proprietor, keeps his clients captive as menial labor, helping him survive out in the bush while martial law and secession movements cut them off from the outside world. What had been a mildly interesting premise collapses in a wave of ’80s-style grodiness when a derelict boat drifts by their camp, its only survivor an adolescent girl. You can guess how the rest goes. This story is competently written, but has no reason to exist other than a wish to be edgy. Maybe, generously, F+

“The Shunned Trailer” by Esther M. Friesner. Humorous and horny Lovecraft pastiche, written in a tongue-in-cheek antique style. Our hero, a fratty Harvard bro on spring break, wants to get drunk and get laid. After some hitchhiking misadventures, he winds up sheltering from a storm in a trailer park full of mutant hillbillies who worship the Elder Gods. It wasn’t terrible, but “Trailer” quickly wore out all two of its jokes and overstayed its welcome. It’s weird, though, how there have been two stories in this issue about trashy inbred freaks. C-

“Tyrannous and Strong” by O’Neil De Noux. Here at age 40, with well over ten years of deliberately wide-ranging reading behind me, it’s quaint to remember how impressionable I was in my teens. Every short story I read back then (and there were so few of them) inspired three or four copycat ideas. I only read this story once, standing there in the Barnes & Noble, but in my notebooks from that time, you’ll find several references: “set this on a ‘Tyrannous & Strong’ type world” and so forth. I also went through a brief fad for widowed main characters. Even our narrator MacIntyre’s talking household computer found its way into one of my earliest Timeworld stories. I’m aware now that De Noux’s world of Octavion — an alien planet with magenta trees, turquoise waters, remote livestock stations, and creatures that happen to be identical to dinosaurs — is a midcentury sci-fi trope, entertaining enough but not nearly as original as my teen self believed. I did enjoy the world De Noux built, though it’s really just dinos, a ranch, hot sun, and some trees of unusual color. The story is slight, little more than a would-be Hemingway’s “a man’s gotta kill the beast to protect what’s his” affair. The titular tyrannosaur is, in all essentials, the one from Jurassic Park. If this were about anything other than dinosaurs, “Tyrannous” would be a big shrug, little more than an extended action sequence. But it’s hard to find decent dino fiction, and of all the stories I’ve tracked down in magazines from this era, this one has aged the most gracefully. So I’ll give it a little boost in the ratings, as a treat. B-

“The Forest Between the Worlds” by G. David Nordley. Early on in this blog, I used to make more of a distinction between hard and soft science fiction, but I let that lapse as I read more sci-fi that couldn’t be cleanly sorted into either category. However, when a story comes with fuckin’ diagrams, I’ll go ahead and file it under hard sci-fi. I mean, look at this:

Ridiculous. Like, we get it, you Did The Math for your story. Goddamn.

Still, the setting is the most interesting aspect of this sprawling novella. Haze and Shadow are a double world, tidally locked, bridged by the titular column of forest, grappling them together in an unlikely but stable configuration. One is reminded of Pluto and Charon in Catherynne M. Valente’s Radiance. It’s a compelling science fictional concept from an era of compelling space opera worlds. It’s richly detailed and is a worthy addition to the Big Stuff in Space tradition.

The characters and outline of the story are less compelling. Sharada is a human anthropologist who’s been getting a bit too personal with the spiderlike Forest People — “going native,” in the colonial phrase. She fucks them because of course she postulates that they communicate information through fluid exchange. And because Haze and Shadow are hothouse worlds, she and all the other human scientists are naked most of the time. Akil, our viewpoint character, is sent up the Forest with fellow researcher Marianne to find Sharada and bring her back to base for a disciplinary hearing. But the spidery Forest People might be more interested in the humans than it seems.

And, of course, because it’s a dude writing sci-fi, I have to CW again for sexualization of a child.

Turns out Sharada has brought the 12 year old daughter of one of the higher-ups into the Forest — the Forest with the fuck-to-communicate aliens. Fucking ugh. I didn’t need to read that. There’s also some genes-are-destiny bullshit about how, before humans genetically modified themselves, women were just naturally more emotional and worse at math. Marianne’s sapphic nature is pointedly called “not an ancient human tradition,” and to get comfort from Akil, she switches to straight like it’s nothing.

Fucking ugh. None of that bullshit was necessary in the space forest novella, my dude. None of it. Violating a 12 year old character added precisely nothing to the story beyond shock value. “Women are so biologically bad at math we had to genetically modify our species” is spectacularly absurd. Pretending lesbianism is some newfangled kink is on that same level.

This story is a wildly mixed bag. Worldbuilding is a solid A. Story is an adequate C or C+. Extraneous “gender is genes” bullshit and child assault? Big old F. Eff eff eff. Maybe I’ll average it out to something around D-

Or hell, I’ll just go with F

Well, that was a wild ride. Good lord. At least the dino story was okay??

I was planning on a paragraph or two about my teenage writing journey and what I wish had gone differently, but I don't want my personal baggage associated with this issue anymore.

2023 read #128: The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag.

The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

252 pages

Published 2021

Read from November 2 to November 3

Rating: 4 out of 5

A bittersweet exploration of the loneliness of being a queer teen, projecting a false self to protect yourself even if it risks never finding happiness within your true self. Morgan, 16 and with no plans to come out of the closet until she’s in college and out of her small town, is rescued from the sea by Keltie, a selkie. Thinking it’s a romantic dream, Morgan kisses Keltie — but it was no hallucination. True love’s kiss allows Keltie to assume human form and walk on land, and aspects of her identity that Morgan wasn’t yet ready to address suddenly become urgent. “You’re the true shapeshifter,” Keltie tells Morgan.

The character design work here is utterly endearing. Keltie and Morgan are also endearing as characters, immediately pulling you into an emotional investment. Morgan herself doesn’t always make the right choices or respect Keltie’s emotional needs. It’s realistic but occasionally heartbreaking.

The coming-of-age story — already emotionally fraught — is complicated by Morgan’s friend group, her brother, and a monstrous harbor tour boat that is endangering Keltie’s seal friends. Things don’t effortlessly fall into place, at least not right away. “Sometimes you have to let your life get messy,” Morgan’s mom tells her at one point. “That’s how you get to the good parts.”

2023 read #127: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

309 pages

Published 1935

Read from October 31 to November 2

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I first got it into my head to read this book way back in the first year or so of this blog, when I was checking off all the high school lit classics that had escaped me before. The fact that no library in Suffolk County owned a copy, and the difficulty in tracking down a used copy for a reasonable price, lent it an unearned mystique in my overactive imagination. I conceptualized Treasure as a pulp masterpiece on the same level as The Ox-Bow Incident, an exercise in stoic poetry, of weather-worn men tortured by the social constraints of performative masculinity and the violence it entails.

Having finally found myself a used copy, I find the reality of Treasure deflates all those idle speculations. It’s closer in spirit to The Road to El Dorado than it is to Blood Meridian. It’s a rangy satire of pulp adventure fiction, poking fun at the easy glory and masculine mythology of pulp magazines. It’s also an extended meditation on the acidic grip of greed, both on the minds of individual people and on societies built on capitalism. Perhaps it was some garbled hearsay of this that sketched my imaginary understanding of Treasure.

Our heroes, Dobbs and Curtin, are two American men weathering the Great Depression and failing to make a quick buck down in Mexico. In the current parlance, the two of them share a single brain cell. The first section of the book follows their job-hunting misadventures in the oil fields and the jungles — bumming pesos, getting scammed by bosses, hiding in a tree from a beast that turns out to be a burro. Bold adventure this is not. Hell, after introducing Dobbs in the first two pages, the book spends the next ten pages delineating the shittiness of a particular flophouse. Atmospheric digressions seem to make up about half the book.

In the end, of course, there’s betrayal and murder, the descent into paranoia, but the characters stumble into it the way they’ve stumbled into everything else, through the power of suggestion and self-delusion.