Review: The Wine Dark Sea, Robert Aickman

Sometimes, it's all about synchronicity. Like how I was walking across town shortly after Time's Fool had been released when a nice local gentleman stops me, tells me he's read it and enjoyed it. Have I, he asks, ever read any Robert Aickman?
Who?
Wrote ghost stories. Apparently my work reminded him of it.  

And what should my excellent godparents have got me for Christmas this year but a copy of Aickman's The Wine Dark Sea? With such a lovely co-incidence in place, how could I resist reading it?

And reader, I must say, I am terribly flattered.

Aickman is nasty. Cold, a little detached, his writing is wonderfully chilling, creating quiet, horrible ghost stories with some moments of gorgeously dry observation cutting through it all. This is the real world, stifling and mundane, shot through with horror that is never lessened by explanation. This is not the vaulting, heartless skies of Lovecraft, this is an insiduous little curl of darkness in your very heart.

Of the collection, my favourites were probably The Fetch, and Never Visit Venice, just because... *shudder*. Perfect build of atmosphere against the gothic set pieces. Love it.

Look, alysdragon dot blogspot isn't a book reccomendation site, really, or a review blog, or even - as I'd once hoped it would be - a criticism blog, really it's just a place I come to write about books in whatever form I see fit. Normally, this takes the form of reviews because normally my response to reading is weighing the good and the bad of any given book and trying to work out who else might enjoy - even if I didn't. Sometimes, my emotions hijack me and I want to rave about something, or else throw it in to the firey pits of perdition. But occasionally, a book is simply mine. I'll read something and not want to judge it, or pull it to pieces, or even reccomend it. I just want to put it on my eternal reread shelf and stroke it occasionally because it is mine and I have just discovered it.

I could talk about Aickman's politics, or his prose, or my analysis of his stories, or the fact that he actually seems to like women and the surprising amount of lesbianism in this book, and I might do all of that when I get a chance. 

But for now I just want to say with credit to a local reader and to my godparents, I've just discovered Robert Aickman.

This book is mine.

Review: Vicious Rumer, Joshua Winning

I had the great privilege of sharing the stage Joshua Winning during the genre panel at the Unbound Author event in Nottingham last October. Eagle eyed observers in the room may have noticed my jaw hitting the stage that during the "who are your influences?" question when Winning answered that his were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Robin Jarvis.

Suffice to say, I bought the damn book.

It's bloody good. I mean, really bloody good.

Vicious Rumer follows Rumer Cross, hard-nosed, solitary, and damaged, as she tries to escape the legacy of her mother: Celene Cross, the so called 'Witch Assassin'. Not so easy when a mobster with a propensity for throwing his enemies in to oubliettes decides that your  mother left a mystical weapon in your care, nor indeed when said mother might placed a curse on you that means anyone you get close to dies a horrible death.

Fast paced, slick, and nasty, this is a cracking thriller that manages to be kinda charming despite not holidng back on the pain, darkness, death and despair. The plot races through blood-magic, political conspiracies, and mob violence without letting up for long enough for our protagonist to have a shower. I tore through reading it at much the same pace. Winning captures Rumer's voice perfectly, her mixture of affected heartlessness and vulnerability providing a capable, sympathetic female protaganist who you are willing to follow in to some very dodgy places and questionable actions.

Honestly, go read it. Jarvis would be proud.

Review: The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

Yes. Yesssssssssssss.

Oh, my blog was having its hiatus when the last one of these came out. The one where I bought half a dozen copies, gave them to all of my friends for Christmas and went, "Look, look! IT'S US!"

So: Did you go to a single sex school? Did you fucking hate it? Or, did you love it, but find yourself the 'red headed stepchild' all the same? Are you still mates with some of the weirdos you met there?
 
Okay. You need to read Drearcliff Grange. 

How to describe this? Superpowers and eldritch abominations at St Trinians? Rip-roaring adventures, jolly hockeysticks, defeating facism, and overcooked swede? These books are nuts and it's fucking marvellous. Newman is the King of Pastiche and he owns this totally.

I need to calm down.

The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School is the second in the Drearcliff series, and expands both the world and the themes that Newman developed in the first novel. It suffers a little from being a transitional piece between the self-contained first book, and the wider series - but it is still an immensely satisfying read. Moreover, Newman addresses that aspect of it thematically, taking Amy, Frecks, Kali, and Emma from the plucky girlhood and simple moralities of The Mysteries... to a adolescence, and a reappraisal of what it is to be a hero.

Certainties are challenged, characters change, and we explore the awkward ground between the broken and the malevolent, balance law agaisnt lawlessness, explore the dangers of privilege, the worth of trust, and the harm that can be done by the simplest of actions. At the heart of the novel is Amy, whose role as the benevolent Kentish Glory is reconsidered as she wonders if she might not do better as the more terrible Death's Head Hawkmoth.

Of course, its all terribly referential, both to adjacent literary worlds and Newman's other works, but that's all part of the fun. If that isn't your sort of thing then... honestly, you might want to find another book review blog.

More seriously, Newman's great strength as a writer is that he manages to drop every name under the sun without ever detracting from the story he is telling at that moment, and this book carries off that trick admirably. An absolute joy.

I loved it so much, I did cosplay.

Thunder in her Veins - the sacredness of geekdom

Some bits of childhood never do make sense.

Look: I grew up in a village with an unreliable bus service and two shops - that became one shop, and then none, and that's where it's settled. It was the sort of place where there were enough people who wore petticoats for the expression "Charlie's dead" to be part of my childhood lexicon. My elder sister was the first - the only - girl on the school's football team. It was a place where 'comic' meant the Dandy and the Beano, or - if you were really lucky - an old copy of Bunty*.

So how I ever came to read Marvel's Thor line is something of a mystery to me. I think I had a Spiderman annual once, and there was the X Men and the Fantastic Four on telly on a Saturday morning, but… Thor? Seriously? I might have been able to get it at the comic book store in the nearest town (seven miles and, apparently, a twenty year timeslip away) but, well, I always knew places like that weren't made for people like me**.

All the same, Thor I did read. A fair few, actually. Mostly the early ones, with Donald Blake in them. I remember being caught by something about them - the disabled man whose vocation was easing others' pain, his walking stick actually the hammer Mjolnir. I still can't really express why, but something about them felt very beautiful, very true.  Maybe it was the overtones of the Fisher King? Maybe it was just the myth connection.

Because I was a myth junkie, devouring folklore and fairytale. If a story was old and epic and glorious, then it was my kind of story. I grinned at the pranks of tricksters, railed at monsters, wept for Prometheus chained to his rock. Raised as both an Anglican and a Baptist (don't ask) I was used to God being male, ineffably right and absorbingly loving. My contact with the grim, problematic stories of the Bible was one sanitised by a Sunday school framing which repackaged them into a reassuring scholasticism where faith (read:goodness) was rewarded, and the wicked (read: unbelievers) were punished.

Noble failure...

Myths weren't like that. In myths, all bets were off. And that made for grandeur and for tragedy. It made for fatal flaws and noble failure. It made for Gods who were tricksy, passionate, even petty. They could be deceived, could deceive. They could be wrong. 

And yet despite all that, they were honourable, powerful, righteous.

It's probably fair to say that I found myself through reading Norse legends. Yes, I was too young, too uncertain, to call it 'faith', yet all the same something in me ran to those myths with a more intuitive open-heartedness than my parents' religion could ever call from me. More, they seemed to understand me. I craved them, the way you crave salt when dehydrated: dread, beautiful Freyja; bright, lost Baldur; Loki - quick, cunning, dangerous; and Thor.

Of course, Thor.

I always feel faintly ridiculous using the word 'sacrilege' in anything other than ironic hyperbole. All the same, there does need to be a word for that hurt that is located somewhere against your heart, behind your ribs, when the things you hold sacred are treated slightingly. As a Pagan who honours certain Norse deities, there is something wrong in seeing the stark, terrible beauty of your mythic landscape re-envisaged into slick, commercial print, complete with hulking villains and so. much. spandex.

Thus it was that, for years, I was embarrassed by the association. Marvel's Thor was not my Thor, their Odin not my AllFather. Drawing that distinction was important, remains important still. But scorning the former overlooks something vital, something powerful, something old. The memory of it came back to me with the release of the MCU film. A sense of struggle, of soaring glory, of a rightness at the very base of something. And, yes, it was more slickly packaged, and sexier than a fireside story about Sir Gawain, but it spoke of something grandiose and sweeping on that same, gut-deep level.

Something sweeping and grandiose

People tend to associate the numinous with a sense of peace, of silent wonder, but sometimes it is more a sense of your heart being pried apart with grinning exuberance. Sometimes, it is that twisting, cathartic need that comes with the raunchiest choruses of folksong, the catchiest reels of the Morris. Sometimes it was what we feel when we hear stories about heroes, about people in extremity, about villains we love to hate, and sometimes just love, despite ourselves.

And that feeling is sacred. Some narratives speak to something deep in us, something more real than anything we enounter in our daily lives.When they are slighted, undermined, mocked, we feel that little wince that cries out 'sacrilege!'. It is one of the reasons why feelings are running so high around this 'Hydra Cap' debacle. Some heroes should be held high, above baseness, above the taint of cynicism.

Yet, collectively, we disown these stories. Heroism, self-sacrifice, betrayal, need - the bright, bold colours of traditional stories - are things we insist upon shutting out as we become 'grown-up', 'critical', 'literary'. But these things are still nestled in us, occupying a space in what I can only call our soul.

My engagement with this comic was not adult. It was not smooth, questioning, probing. It was not the 'refined' tastes that I have spent years cultivating. No. It was the wild joy that got me into stories in the first place. It made me air punch, made me grin, made me arch my feet and press my eyes together. I cared from a place of total, unironic absorpsion. I felt this book, felt the way I once felt as I tore around the playground pretending to be the Human Torch.

(Flame on!)

But, as such, an actual review is beyond me. Is Mighty Thor: Volume 7 great art? Will it change the shape of Literature as we know it?

Is the story any good, even? Should you read it?

I have no fucking clue. Sorry.

Also: Malekith the Accursed - just too FABULOUS for your morality.

There are some books out there that make you realise the futility of reviewing books, that make you see there is no helpful, universal rubric to define whether something is worthwhile. Yes, you can analyse craft and effect and technique, but sometimes a story speaks to something that is too pronounced and personal, its power over you too great to allow you to reach for your wonted pose of critical objectivity.

I have to admit that, while I tend to enjoy what I read, I'm not especially immersed in Marvel 616 stuff. As an adult reader, it's rare they provide me with more than an entertaining stopping post for an insatiable bookworm. Mighty Thor: Thunder in Her Veins went so far beyond that faint praise that there is no comparison - but those feelings are so subjective that I cannot extend to any of you.

As such, I really can't recommend it. Do you like stories about honour and righteousness, about family and longing, about war and good and evil, and some things that you just can't categorise? Then maybe read it. You might get something from it.

But, while we're on the subject of recommenations, what I have to say is that  it isn't really this comic you need to read. No. Don't seek out a specific story or book, don't listen to anything else. Instead, shrug off your irony. Ignore the cheap, headline grabbing shots, the 'risky' takes appealing to the part of you that wants to tarnish and tear down.

No. Reach into your heart and find those embarrasing remnants of unmitigated joy - however commerical, low brow or melodramatic they may be. Find your heroes - your glorious and impossible heroes - and cling to them. Celebrate them.

We are readers. We are better than that.

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*What? The stories were better.
** Shout out to 'The Grinning Demon' and 'Whatever Comics' of Maidstone, which (when I finally plucked up the courage to slip inside) were absolutely lovely. But you know what I meant.