Review: Uncle Silas, Sheridan le Fanu

So... owning up time. Who else always gets this one confused with Silas Marner?

Just me? Good good.

Right, I picked this one up in the secondhand bookshop, knowing nothing more about it that it was apparently a Gothic, and it was written by the same guy who did Carmilla. It was pretty much what you'd expect. Heiresses! Crumbling stately homes! Evil plots! Laudanum! Trains!

As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this one, but struggled to take it particularly seriously. It was quite predictable, and like many Romances of Terror, if you look at things from a plot perspective, it didn't really deliver on many of its promises.

That said, there are a few things to be said for it - firstly, Silas Ruthyn himself is one heck of dish. Quite the silver fox, much prone to dabbing his temples with cologne and sighing about all the bungling fuckwits by whom he has the misfortune to be surrounded. Honestly, from a slightly biased perspective, I would say the character was wasted and we could have done with a lot more of him - but then I have a type.

Secondly, and because this is a respectable literary blog (I say, as you all collapse in to laughter) I was quite taken with Le Fanu's clarity and precision. Uncle Silas is what happens when Northanger Abbey meets Udolpho  - Le Fanu recongises that county men and respectable countries are as full of rogues and abusers as the most fantastical stories, it is only that the villains must comport themselves more carefully. The blending of modernity - at least, for the time of writing - and isolation was really powerful. Rather than Stoker's triumphalist use of technology, the railway in Uncle Silas simply makes the world feel smaller, more limited. It offers no escape to our protagonist, only faster transport for her persecutors.

Le Fanu also came through in his fairness both to young female characters, and female friendship. Barring Silas himself, and Dr Bryerly, the male characters we encounter are relatively anodyne. For all the men drive the plot,  they are not a patch on the vividness of Milly, Meg, or even Madame de la Rougierre - who may not actually do much, but who remain with you. Milly and Maud's friendship, especially, was delightful to read.

I won't mince words - Maud Ruthyn herself is something of a drip. She does not have the poise or intelligence of Carmilla's narrator, and occasionally I wanted to smack her across the side of the head, but even still, Le Fanu is fair to her. She is shown to grow over the course of the novel, and her adult commentary on her youthful follies are quite incisive. Despite all her silliness, she is never treated as a joke, or deserving of suffering - yet neither is her lack of worldliness of common-bloody-sense held up some sort of unrealistic paradigm of virtue. She's immature - that's all.

I like that about Le Fanu - while I might not agree with everything he writes about gender, he didn't hate teenage girls.
 Naturally, it was written in the 1860s, so warnings apply for all the usual 'hilarious' and 'shifty' bumpkins, virulent antisemitism, fetishing of Romany culture, and 'sinister foriegners'. I do so wish they wouldn't.

But, aside from that, an absolutely fine Gothic novel. Better than Udolpho, although that isn't difficult.

Review: My Glass is Runn, Die Booth

Zombie stories I actually liked!

Okay, that isn't a review. Let's try again.

Die Booth's latest collection of short stories My Glass is Runn is a delightfully ambiguous mix of terror and tenderness. These are stories that are not afraid to look at the dark places, but are capable of remarkable grace, and it is in this tension that the collection works.

Take a story like 'The Ghost Bride' where a bereaved mother is haunted by a white clad apparition - the victim of a terrible crime. The sense of eireeness, of the uncanny, of the awful things one does for love are intense - but Booth never looses that human dimension, giving the denoumont it's power. These are tales that slip through cracks, offering different constructions on horror truisms, motivations that come at you from the left field. These twists of perspective can be used to offer a redemption, even a happy ending. Sometimes, they can throw you headlong in to the shockingly dark. Perhaps most unsettling, however, is when Booth decides to bring the two into ambiguous synthesis.

This is a collection that is wary of authority, or conventional success. It sides against parents, bosses, peers groups and urban life, in favour of more equitable, human connections, life lived on a smaller scale. There a real tenderness here, even in the most uncomfortable moments - a sense of outsiders tenuously clinging to one another, seeking some desperate relief. This is not to say there aren't some distinct and impressive scares - 'Don't Be Afraid of the Lights' is a glory of skin-crawling horror - but Booth deals in a quieter unease which I found remiscent of Kate Mos.

However, for all its strengths, My Glass is Runn is an uneven collection; many of the stories have previously been published elsewhere and some of the shorter examples have the abruptness I associate with a tight word cout. It isn't that they aren't perfectly satisfying ghost stories as they stand, it is only that compared to the longer pieces in the collection it becomes clear that they could could have done with a little more space to breathe.

Indeed, Booth's fiction seems more suited to a slightly longer tale - with the exception of 'Dust Bunnies', my favourites tended to be those where more time was allowed for character development and the slow build of terror. And, where this suceeds, it is sublime. 'Maketh the Man' is probably my favourite, and a nightmarishly intense look at infatuation and its consequences, but 'The Fourth Ape' is also a fantastic take Gothic, while 'To Be Heard' is a wonderful ghost story in the old style.

Also, zombie stories that I liked.

There really is an awful lot to love here. Booth balances the familiar ghost story form with a fresh and unconventional voice. Not only is My Glass is Runn a book to read - he is an author to watch.

Review: Sophie and the Sibyl by Patricia Duncker

I made even more of a mess than usual with this photo...

I was honoured - blessed even - to have Duncker as a lecturer in my first year at UEA, and it is entirely due to her passion about the early Gothic to which I owe my own need to trace the genre back to its roots, and treat Ann Radcliffe as something more than the punchline of Northanger Abbey. Her attitude - frank, incisive and without snobbery - was an inspiration to the 18 year old know-it-all brat that I was then.

No, I didn't ask her to sign my copy of The Deadly Space Between. In those days, encountering writers whose books I liked was enough to send me running in the opposite direction in terror of my own complete inability to behave passably in front of someone whose good opinion I value. These days, I'd just muscle it out until they're convinced I'm a total idiot. Experience must be worth something, eh?

Anyway, Sophie and the Sibyl!

I have often been charged with an unfair dislike of realism, of flipping the writing class truism on its head and crying, "Yes, but what does the abscence of any supernatural element actually bring to the story?" and using, "This book wasn't for me," as a translation of, "There were no ghosts" But I maintain (to flip another truism) that of course you can write a book without supernatural elements, provided you prove yourself capable of writing something with them as well.

(Yes, I was very popular in my Creative Writing classes. Why do you ask?)

Oh, Gods, though, this book was gorgeous. Just a delightful character study, a beautiful historical novel that had me turning pages in enraptured glee. Revelling in its love of Literature, it is the perfect product of an analytical mind wedded to the demands of a keen reader. It's a book to make you think and make you feel.

Perhaps there was nothing seminal about it, but it was intelligent, engaged and absorbing. It just goes to show, that I have nothing against realism per se, only provided it is done well.

Time's Fool - coming in to the light

My debut novel Time's Fool is now live on the Unbound site.

Regular readers of this blog will know how much supernatural fiction means to me. Time's Fool is my lovesong to the genre - an homage to Dracula and an edgy, contempory take on the conventions of the Victorian Gothic. 

Please, do pop over there and check it out.

Review: Spirit Houses by Die Booth

Alright, alright, let's come clean. This blog is officially on hiatus until August at least, but probably September. There are reasons but they are too dull to go into here.

Instead, I cite the bit of Twitter logic that brings me crawling back for a brief visit - if you like a book by an independent author, review it. A few weeks ago, I was recommended Die Booth's Spirit Houses, and my word, did I like it.

 A romping, almost steam-punk adventure following Manda Connor and her fellow Field Nurses in the D.P.M - the Department of Paranatural Medicine - it does not rely over-much on the apparatus of non-functional gears and eldritch threats, being instead driven by engaging and entertaining characters.
 It is a novel that quickly gives one the impression of being cast into a much larger world, so lush and fully realised are the premise and setting. Booth does not expend excess words upon world-building or set-up, but the detail of vision is constantly revealed by the plot. It's almost disconcerting how thoroughly built and convincing this alternative England is - the mental space it occupies feels more like a beloved film series, or long running television show than a novel. It seems so much bigger than it is; there is so much richness here, I sometimes felt the need to pace myself - although that may just have been the fact that I was screen-reading.

In tone cosy, the narrative and characters had an almost YA feel to them, something enhanced by both the institutional setting of the D.P.M, and the '20s pastiche of the setting - there is no sex, or language stronger than 'damn' - but there is a poise and maturity of theme that is reminiscent of Lanni Taylor. For all the tenderness with which the characters are painted, as a reader you worry about them. They are breakable, things may not turn out okay. And you want for it it turn out okay.

Naturally, it isn't flawless. If you have an issue with head-hopping (which I think is unfairly maligned, but each to their own) this is not the novel for you. Likewise the prose, while generally light and witty with moments of real beauty, sometimes loses itself in descriptors which grate - the characters do a lot of eye rolling. The opening chapters are also somewhat stilted, something not helped by the initial construction of Manda's character and the suggestion of a love-triangle surrounding her. However, Spirit Houses quickly finds its stride, and its protagonist's mixture of naïveté and passion soon create a heroine who is more than a cipher for events, or an idealised reader-insert. Spirit Houses is a novel about identity, about the choices we make and the people that we have to be to make them. 

It is here that Spirit Houses finds its strength. Characters are revenants, werewolves, displaced souls. They make deals with demons, lie, manipulate their friends. But these issues do not define them; they are merely facets of personality, burdens to be borne, actions of necessity. This is a compassionate novel, and is written from a standpoint empathetic with otherness. Characters are outsiders: the slow, hard-working Ray who refuses to take advantage of his privileged background; the brilliant, cold Daniel proving his genius despite the handicap of his working class roots; genial, foppish Alex inciting the ire of the more conventionally masculine and, of course, Manda herself, battling the prejudice she faces at her lycanthropy, desperate for a place in the world.With astute political awareness, Booth weaves these personal struggles into the wider world of the D.P.M, its language of respect and patient consent offering a kinder and more intelligent picture of the integration of the para-natural than I am used to seeing. 

I would hold this book up against Glen Duncan's brash and unconvincing The Last Werewolf as an example of what existence on the fringes of acceptability really looks like - not bloodbaths and 'gut-wrenching' last stands against cartoon villains as part of the great journey of the Virile White Man™ - but as the slow weight of judgement, the fight for dignity and health, for a normal life.

Well worth your time.

Review: The King in Yellow

What is it about nineteenth century genre fiction that's just sweeties to me? 

I was browsing in the sizeable horror section of my local indie bookstore (LOVE being able to type those words) and I come across a volume with a cool cover and a title that immediately has me humming this:

So, I pick up this book and flips it over it's a "blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose" (check), that it deals with a dangerous, forbidden book (check) and that it was a major influence on a certain Howard Philips Lovecraft (...check).

Well, good little shopper I am, I toddle over to the gentleman at the till and asked him if he would recommend it. His answer was that it was great (check), but that I should be warned, Chambers had been a fin de siècle artist in bohemian Paris, and his prose had never quite got... over... it....

That sound? That's me shouting, "Oh, JUST TAKE MY MONEY."

You can see from the cover it's already well loved.

And, seriously?

Sometimes you get that sense that a book was written just for you, like it was dropped into your pocket by the author with a little whisper in your ear to look at it when you get home, or like a kiss upon the cheek that someone has sent half-way across the globe and through a hundred years of time just for it to brush against you, here, now.

This is a book that whispers its horror, not one that screams it. A book that throws shade into subtle and unsettling patterns. Yes, Chamber's prose is rather soaring at times, his pace not modern, but for me that is a long way from a criticism. Uneasy, beautiful, haunting, he is not so committed to otherworldly awfulness to prevent him giving a few whispers of hope, of reconciliation. There are even moments of humour (I've never laughed so much about a cactus.) I shan't harp on about the Carcosa mythos, because many words have been expended upon that by others and justly so. Besides, what made more impression upon me was the way Chambers captured the the soft tragedy of the folk tradition, the way that the volume is like a piece of music that continues playing in your head long after you have finished it.

And I found myself asking if we had adopted lost Carcosa, rather than dread Cthulhu as our rallying cry, if the forbidden text that haunted us were the chilling, seductive King in Yellow, rather than the cold, instructional Necronomicon, would geek culture have taken something of a different path?

Because Chambers' narrators are not generally anaemic, neurotic young men descending into madness from terror of the unknowable, but full, even healthy, personalities who brush against strangeness, madness and despair, whether it be supernatural or otherwise. There are no simplistic absolutes here, no sense of false, cringing lights in the Universe's uncaring abyss, but a seething, unsettling place of questionable moralities, violence, tenderness, politics, sex. Faced with the Other, Chamber's narrators will empathise even while they exploit. What's more, Chambers was not bound by his genre. His supernatural is not a thing apart, howling in its madness. The madness is within us, as is the love, the hope, and the evil. Beyond all this he moved, writing of the future and the past, the real and the impossible while speaking of the same things - power, innocence, knowledge and loss.

Sublime.

What Price Fantasy? Consent and the policing of desire

This is sort of a follow-up to Alys' Addiction to Villains, dealing as it does with that fraught line between the fictional and the real.

Sex scenes and Consent:

A while ago, I read this fantastic article on the importance of consent in fiction by literary agent Laura Zats. The reason it's brilliant is because she's right. Consent is necessary, and hot and, y'know, the line between fun-times and sexual assault. Yet while the majority of my brain was cheering on this home-run of good sense and ethical sexy times in romance novels, I read this sentence and a tiny part of me flinched.

"Romance novels are also examples of what love and sex should look like in the real world."

I ignored the flinch. I flinch a lot.

But as the article charged on breathless to its rebuttal of rape culture, the little bit of me that flinched wriggled around a bit, pulled and nagged at my mind, and before I knew it I had my arms crossed over my chest and there was that nasty little whisper that used to keep me awake at night, "Just what is wrong with you?"

Ouch.

I thought I'd kicked that one. I thought I'd accepted the kinky mess of my brain, thought I'd settled with myself that dark thoughts and darker desires were not incompatible with self-worth, that I knew what I really needed and deserved, and what was just fun to think about. I thought I was over this.

But you're never over it. And it never takes much to bring it back again. Just some sweeping comment from a misogynist, just some below-the-line comment from an intellectual lightweight trying to save me from myself.

Or a thoughtful, intelligent, necessary article from someone I'd be proud to call an ally.

My shipping, my head-canon, the erotica I write (that you chaps are seriously never reading) would this be judged by others as "examples of what love and sex should look like in the real world", when it's not, and it isn't intended that way, and for goodness sakes, aren't we all aware of that by now?

I'm done berating myself about this. I got angry. 

Fiction is another word for fantasy. 

Even the most real-world, blow by blow account of an ordinary day is a fabrication, a falsity. And yeah, while I agree that we need a world that does not normalise sexual assault via media, can we not accept that some things are an escape? That some people like to think about things that - in real world terms - would constitute serious criminal acts?

Politically, I am left of centre. 

Actually, I'm left of centre by quite a long way. 

In fact, I probably couldn't see the centre with a telescope, but that's immaterial. As an unrepentant lefty, I would like to think that I am ethical. As such, I want an end to all the ways that people use power to hurt each other. I want an end to rape. I want, desperately, for every kind of non-consensual sexual activity eradicated from our world. I want our conversations around sex to become unambiguous and free from shame. I would like all abusive tosspots to learn how to be decent human beings and, frankly, while we're at it, I'd like an anarchist utopia. 

That's what I pray for, after all: people being decent to each other not because of law, custom or fear, but because it's the decent thing to do.

But just because I want these things, doesn't mean I'm not allowed to read books that glamorise vicious feudal societies. Just because I'm anti-murder does that mean I must resist the charm of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Just because I am a pacifist, am I not allowed to enjoy Preacher?

So, yeah, I'm anti rape. But does that mean I have to bar non-con from my fantasy life as well?

Especially when we get kinky, it's all about consent.

It's probably about time I mentioned BDSM. This is, after all, as much as a fictional framing device as erotic fiction. However 24/7 a relationship, it is still has its limits, however extreme the actions, they are always bound by consent. BDSM allows people to hurt or be hurt at one remove, not to experience power but to play at it. Just because someone someone indulges in interrogation play does not mean they want to be interrogated. BDSM is a safe space for fantasies, it is a yes-but-not-really.

I have heard arguments from erotica writers and readers that this is how it should be, that non-con should always be framed as fantasy within the construct of a story. So, any scene where a questionable act is eroticised it is necessary to reveal it as a consensual activity where all participants are engaging in a mutual game of make-believe. We may see something vicious, even violent, but when the lens pans out we see the mutual laugh and hug afterwards, the safe-word and the quick release restraints. In a longer story, we see these safe guards working, we see that this is all consensual and that, however intense, it is all in the name of good fun.

BDSM gives us as neat a get-out clause in fiction as it does to real life. We can go to these places without ever bringing our ethics into question.

But when we're reading a novel or a story we already have a framing device which tells the reader that nothing that follows is really real. A work of fiction is, of itself, a consensual, mutual game between the reader and the author. If a reader likes the idea of a forceful hunk sweeping them up to the bedroom over their half-hearted protestations, then a book is a place they can have that without the ensuing emotional scars. If at any point something unsettles them, triggers them, hurts them, they can say a non-negotiable "no", and put down the book. Stopping reading is the best safe-word in the world. 

What is more, most adults are capable of this distinction between reality and fiction. We know what we're reading isn't real - any crimes committed are not real crimes, the blood shed disappears with the next turned page. To add to this wonderful game a second disclaimer would be almost like a massive subtitle on the dangerous bits of an action film which state "These explosions are a special effect! Stunt doubles were used and not harmed!" 

When one reads - especially when one reads erotica - one suspends one's disbelief in order to get one's jollies. One does not want to come back to earth with a thump. We get it. It's a construct. If you aren't conversant with that, you really shouldn't be playing the game - you are still scrabbling at the backs of wardrobes seeking passage to Narnia, still walking into walls between platforms at King's Cross. 

So I could get scornful here, vicious against the people who fail to understand that, just because I entertain questionable notions in my head, doesn't mean I am ever going to act upon them in real, non pre-agreed reality.

But this attitude is rather glib.

Because that isn't what this is about. Because even though books are safe spaces, even though they are the finest of fetish clubs, even I draw back from too much realism in my villain. One might be fine with the idea of an elf-lord dreamboat pinning one's hands and ripping one's bodice, but when the setting is a market town in Surrey and the ravisher in question is a stockbrocker then no matter how much emotionally escapist bliss comes into play, to me that's going to sound like date rape.

Likewise, while I know that writers have no particular responsibility to their readers as a moral force, I am also aware of the part they play in creating cultural discourses and normative modes in the media. And these discourses - for all they are created in that 'harmless' realm of paper an ink - can cause real-world suffering, real world pain. I'm not talking about Harry Potter being the slippery slope into Satanism, I'm talking about semiotics. I'm talking about yet another strand of media excusing sexual assault, normalising it, glorifying it. 

In short, I'm talking about rape culture. Faced with that, to say, "It's only fantasy, I won't self censor, sod the consequences" is to show either blinding privilege or borderline malice. 

There should probably be a conclusion here

But there won't be. Because I know that people can't be held accountable for their fantasies provided those fantasies remain fiction (in whatever form). Because I know that reading about non-con, however horrific or scary, and getting off on it is not the same thing as wanting it to happen. I know that, as people, we need to challenge the dark bits of our minds, to embrace them and enjoy them if we can do that without harming people. I know that devotes of the macabre, fans of the kinky among us shouldn't have to feel like freaks, shouldn't need to be ashamed that they get a frisson from things a bit beyond the beaten track. The stigma against these things is strong enough as it is; let's not shame people further.

But I know, too, that if a story is told often enough to become our mode of understanding a thing it can do incalculable harm. I know if a person's, particularly a woman's, "No" comes to signify only token resistance, then we live in a society that excuses rape. And I am a hundred percent certain that this is wrong.

So I can't reach an answer. The line between fiction and reality is nothing like so definite as the line between enthusiastic consent and everything else. The boundary of what is too close to the bone changes from reader to reader, author to author, person to person. What's more, in a society that has so much shame, so much obfuscation around desire, too many people find themselves unable to communicate, to give or to ask consent. So, yes, we certainly need discourses which show us the words to do this, but as fiction reflects reality, we also need words which reflect back the pain of that inability, words for that struggle, for that uncertainty. 

How much do writers owe to ethics? To reality? At what price do our fantasies come? I wish there were a rubric that I could get behind, a pocket guide to acceptability because with the cost so high in human suffering, I could do with one.

All I know for certain is this; I am a Gothic writer, a teller of fucked up little narratives with ambiguous moralities, and I am not always sure that I am doing the right thing.

What I've been reading: The Count of Monte Cristo.

*Checks date*

Still here, I'm afraid.

Eeek. Sorry.

So, I'm on the home stretch with this, and this post this contains spoilers. Also, much SQEEEEEEE!

Where have we got to? Well, the Count of Morcerf has shot himself (YAY!), Valentine is languishing from strychnine poisoning (which has at least cleared her of murder) Albert is adorable (but not particularly bright), the footnotes were written by an idiot and Maximilian Morrel is frankly a bit of a dick.

Oh. And Eugénie is a lesbian. In case you hadn't noticed. Or if you'd forgotten.

 Seriously, if I had one complaint with this novel (besides the chronic idiocy of the editor) it was the sheer iron-bar quality with which Dumas handles Eugénie's sapphism. Because we get it. REALLY. WE GET IT.

Other than that, it's fan-fucking-tastic. After a slow middle bit (blah, gradual bankruptcy, blah, medical details of minor characters we don't really care about, necessesary foundation laying for this bit, blah, Maximillian bloody Morell...) it's all kicked off. Four (count 'em, four) challenges to duels, three deaths by poison, two attempted suicides by honour and AT LAST, someone blows their own brains out from feelings of shame!

Oooooh! And, while we're at it, the honour code in this! All the clenched fists and the deathly pale expressions and the choice of weapons at some place of your choosing! All the fainting and the thrown gloves and sudden reversion to calling your friend, "sir" like it's an insult....It's so delicious, so sharp and complicated and brilliant...

And Haydée, Haydée.... Is she actually the first portrayal of a sexual submissive in literature? Because I am shipping so hard...

So, yeah, this is basically such sheer, sexy, ego packed brilliance that I have been grinning for the last 24 hours. It's better, even, that Three Musketeers. And Dumas is such fun! 

That's one thing I never really realised back when the only copy I had was an abridgement. Sorry to hammer on this theme, but the biggest crime of the abridged versions is how they cut all this to the bone. The important bit is that Dantès shames Fernand, so that's all they give you. They don't give you Albert's anguish, his dilemma, his pride. They don't show him almost chucking his glove at Dantès in a crowded opera house while his friends hang around him with, "Don't do it, Morcerf, really, not smart." (And, seriously, that is a wonderful piece of pacing and building tension, even for someone who knows what happens next.) Oh, you get that Haydée is beautiful and submissive, but you don't see her taking the initiative, you don't see her shouting down her opponent in court. You don't see her bear herself like a queen. Without this, she is a child with a creepy crush, not someone in what is a prototype D/s relationship.

So, after slashing away all this wonderful stuff, you get cardboard cut-outs racing around as much plot as you can fit into 300 pages (a plot whose elegance and complexity is utterly muddled by these cuts) and, reading this, generations of idiots have the audacity to call Dumas a cheap cliché-ridden hack.

And, yeah, it's a bit melodramatic, it's a thing of bold, broad strokes, but there is also subtlety and real passion there. Last night, I read a scene of such breathtaking and tragic intensity that I suspect it will be joining Renfield's desperate plea of sanity  (Doctor Seward's diary, 1st October, 4am, Dracula, Chapter 18) as one of the scenes I murmur aloud in breathless, heartfelt tones every time I read it...  This damn fool of an editor thinks Dumas is condemning Mercédès here, but she shines! She burns like falling star! Oh, these feelings, so lost, so painful, so buried beneath years of torment but strong enough to control them and.... Ah! Perfect. Perfect.

This is everything I ever want in book. This is just....

Actually, it's probably the reason I'm using so many exclamation marks. 

So, go on. Clear your reading diary and have some fun. It's the holidays.

What I've been reading: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, To Kill a Mockingbird, Preacher: Until the End of the World

I finished Gone With the Wind this week. My review is that the last chapter had my hands involuntarily clenching into fists so often that my knuckles started to ache. Let's be done with it.

So, now I've finally driven an iron stake through the heart of that dreadful book (not literally - I what do you take me for?) I've been free to follow my own projects and catch up with some real reading. Yay!

And, you know, it's felt like the Gods of Literature have been rewarding my for my perseverance. I have just read three books (three!) which demanded that desperate, breathless haste, three books that demanded I surrender those so-called necessities of sleep, food and personal hygiene, three books that were pretty damned close to flawless. I honestly don't think I've had a streak this good before. Kind of frightened of breaking it.

So, these books:

These 'Penguin Modern Classics' covers are bit boring.

I have been meaning to read Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle for years. It's one of those books you hear whispers about, the sort of book that's mentioned in interviews by writers that you love, or tucked into book reviews as a standard against which someone fails or succeeds. Bookshops tend not to carry it, um and arr about it being in print. If you try to get a copy from the library you'll discover that there's only one in the county, and they'll take three months sending it to you.

Worth it. Oh, it is worth it.

Will you judge me if I say it's charming? Even if I assure you I'm not gushing or being sentimental? This book is like a spell, one that weaves itself about you, much as the narrator Merricat rings her house with protective amulets.

Yes, Merricat. At first, I didn't trust her, viewed her with the same aggressive curiosity, the same unease, that she gets from the villagers. As the novel unfurled (and it does unfurl, like something natural, like a leaf,) as it became clear that Merricat is not the kind of person one can trust, I began to do so. Caught in her hostile, lonely, beautiful world, captured by her strange, angry magics, I was captivated by her, began to like her, love her, trust her. Oh, Merricat may be a villain, but she is more faithful, more consistent than any of the other characters in the book. We see their grotesquenesses through her eyes. Her life of rejection, of isolation, of otherness we recognise; we know her intense wild joy from the shadow-versions of it that we have lived.

Or that was how I felt about it, anyway.

It is a book about food, how the way it is portioned out, created, corrupted, denied, the way it is analogous with love. It is a mythic book, one where the ineffectual, childlike rituals of our narrator slowly become a potent magic, one with a power to shape the world, to bind Merricat herself- the true 'terrible one' at the heart of the novel. I could write about this for hours. I should probably stop now.

On to another book about rural American life, another bood with a precocious, tomboyish narrator, another book I had been planning to read for a while. Although, I suspect the comparisons should stop here because the novel is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

I'd always been a bit dubious about reading this. You need to understand that, in my mother's view, Atticus Finch was basically the perfect man. When it came down to it, Atticus Finch played be Gregory Peck was the equivalent of... I don't know... probably Henry Tilney played by Paul McGann. From the comparison, you can probably guess that my mother and I have values regarding these things.

Well, I shouldn't have waited so long. The book is as good as the hype, better maybe. I could scarcely go two pages without finding a sentence, a paragraph, an exchange, that I wanted to read aloud to whatever long suffering person was in the room with me.

As to Atticus Finch? No, I would not leave home for Atticus Finch. I can understand why someone would, though. His attitudes to gender and race are not modern, but are about as progressive as is possible for the time the novel is set. He also shows a remarkably accurate (albeit slightly paternalist) understanding of the very modern concept of privilege. A wonderful, beautiful, powerful book. I'd recommend it to anyone, but particularly as an antidote to the poison that was Gone With the Wind.

Last, but by no means least, we reach Preacher: Until the End of the World. Whereas this week's other books are tender, melancholy and poetic, while they focus on isolation, outsider statues, the effects of hatred and human compassion, Preacher is gleefully, viciously aggressive. While its main theme is a careful, moral exploration of religion and power, if it has an overall message, that message is that violence solves things. I won't pretend it isn't dark and nasty, that it doesn't splash itself across our minds with glorious, visceral impact. That is kinda the point.

Okay, it is not the book to read if you are triggered by... well, anything. It is bloodthirsty,it is vicious, it gives you a world that will kick you when you are down, one that will only back off it you kick back harder than you can imagine. In terms of the series, it's far better than the first instalment. I adored this book, but it's one of those when, on the brink of recommending it, I realise that it would not be everyone's cup of tea.

Steve Dillon's art is, of course, wonderful. There is a power and clarity to his lines that suits Garth Ennis' script perfectly. There are very few comic book artists who draw faces so expressively. There are even fewer who can make someone being shot in the head look so beautiful. Ennis' work - which didn't entirely convince me in Gone to Texas - is far stronger here, working with a wit, confidence and subtlety which drew me in from the very start.

I had real trouble finding an image that was neither too horrific, or too spoilerific. Still, lovely stuff.

Unashamedly violent, this book is not without tenderness, not, indeed, without a guiding morality. The scenes between Jesse and Tulip are painful in their sweetness, the balancing of moral relativity and moral absolute careful. There is some questionable content, sure - some jokes made that perhaps would not be made today, that perhaps should not have been made then. Some assumptions that aspects of the plot imply gave me pause. I can see this book being problematic, if not outright hurtful. But it is pervaded by a sense of joyous and perverse irresponsibility, a glee in showing the nightmares of the conservative mind that I personally did not find it offensive. Even if I did, I might forgive it: moving, harrowing, and wonderfully crafted, it also manages to be great fun, and that's better than you're going to get nine times out of ten.

Approach with caution,  but if it's your kind of thing? Hell, let's tall about books.

The Vampire as a Leaky Vessel: problems of gender in vampire fiction, part 1

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will update weekly, addressing late 19th and early 20th Century vampire fiction:

So, I'm not entirely sure where I first encountered the expression, “the female body is a leaky vessel”, but I know it was at some point during my BA. I was reading one of those books I used to get to peruse – the ones with titles like, Queering the Middle Ages¹. Anyway, I liked the phrase. It stuck with me all through the writing, reading and note-taking I did on archetypes in folk ballads and the legality and theology behind pre-1750 marriage, simply because that is a brilliant way of looking at the whole squeamish, misogynist mess surrounding bodies in our culture. The female body is leaky.

For we have, do we not, a dichotomy in the dominant social discourse? A myth of two genders who fall under that generic term of 'mankind'. Two genders, one of which does it all properly, and another which doesn't exactly play ball, which is – not to put too fine a point on it – faulty. After all, women don't have a discreet pattern of arousal. They don't have nice, neat interaction with the reproductive process, an inoffensive little flap of tissue that hangs down, and – in theory - only makes its presence felt, only making a mess when it is called upon to do its duty. If the male member realises that it is not wanted, it can – at least theoretically – make its retreat. After the business is done, it need only wash itself and we are back to square one, back to the unperturbed, normative, sexless body of inert masculinity.

Without that pattern of arousal, while the female body can never be considered entirely sexual, it is also never - socially, politically, or even physically – inert. In terms of sexuality, the female body is leaky.

If it were not enough that women can't have a man's proud, upstanding organ, not enough that their bodies have – potentially – limitless ability for sexual performance², women menstruate. If you have unprotected sex with them, women drip. And after that there is pregnancy with all its discharge, morning sickness, blocked sinuses, swelling middles and stress incontinence. There is labour with all the blood, faeces, vomit, amniotic fluid and 'show' – that nightmare combination of sneeze and nosebleed which makes its presence felt through jellied lumps sliding from woman's vulva just as she enters active labour. (Consider this a public service announcement for all expectant mothers. No-one ever tells you about 'show'.)

I apologise to any gentlemen who are now running for the smelling salts, but suffice to say all this unspeakable mess doesn't even take us to the baby, which (covered in meconium or otherwise), flops out, followed by a blue-white sinew of umblilical cord and a chunk of bloody yech that is the after birth. When that's all done, then comes the lactating: tits like Catwoman's, and the superpower of being able to shoot milk across a room, ruining five bras in half an hour.

Honestly, if you're beginning to sympathise with some of the more paranoid ramblings I encountered during my degree, I can see your point. You may sympathise with that old moderate, St Jerome, who got his head in such a twist over the idea of pregnant women that he had the urge to punch them in the bump.³ Or you may feel there was some grounding in the medical treatise that claimed women's menstruation was how they rid themselves of the impurities they got from congress with lepers.

Lovely.

Also, what?

We went pretty quickly from 'ugh, girl cooties' to 'fornicating with lepers'. What with the moral and social stigma attached Hansen's disease and extra-marital sex in that period, that's a pretty extreme explanation for a routine process of ejecting useless tissue.

But that's just it, isn't it? This discourse of leaky women who drip and bleed and gush plays very easily into a belief that women are leaky in their moral, as well as physical selves. After all, to the medieval imagination, women, were the agents of the fall. In the dichotomy of heaven/earth, king/state, head/body, women were very much supposed to occupy the latter position in each balance. This rhetoric is remarkably pervasive. Go to the right places, you'll still hear it today: “Just as Jesus is the head of the church, so the man is...”

God created mankind in his image. He created women in his image, as well. He just created them a bit different, a bit more bodily, a bit more earthy, a bit, well, leakier. So it stands to reason, doesn't it, that if something is bodily rather than spiritual, animal rather than civilised, 'faulty' rather that 'normative', it is simultaneously less male, less human. Indeed, it becomes female.

I promised you vampires, didn't I?

There are lots of ways this nasty little myth wriggles itself into our culture. There are lots of ways it played out in the medieval discourse that I'm not going into here. What's interesting me right at this minute is the way my passion number one (perceptions of gender, sexuality and marriage, particularly in the medieval and early modern period) has a curious intersection with what is probably passion number three.

Namely, vampires.

Yes, that's it. Sorry it took me so long.

What this is really all about is a vague trend I have noticed from reading far, far too many vampire novels: the later the narrative, the more likely it is that male vampires will be portrayed as attractive, as desirable, as sympathetic. A female vampire not only retains a more or less steady attractiveness over time, but is in fact far less likely to occur the later the narrative.

The folkloric vampire and its liminal state:

We don't really see vampires as bodily any more. No, don't start listing all the gruesome vampire films you've seen – if you're reading this, you're probably an expert and therefore don't count. Instead, go and ask an average seven year old what a vampire looks like. Because in this, post-Dracula world, most people's first impression of a vampire is essentially a smoothed down version of Bela Lugosi – male, adult, white.

We all know what a vampire looks like

The image is cartoonish in its ubiquity. It is a Hallowe'en caricature: smooth skin and slick hair. Its colour come in bold blocks and contrasts: white shirt, black jacket; white skin, red eyes; black cloak, red lining. Even the much maligned Robert Patterson/Edward Cullen look feeds into this photo-shopped perception of vampirism: hair in such rigid spikes it looks carved that way, skin with something of a lacquered finish, eyes a bright amber under manga-distinct brows. Vampires these days are not physical, they do not smear themselves across our consciousness. They are complete, discreet, self-contained. They have the same studied passivity of religious icons.

Vampires didn't used to be like that. They didn't even, in the words of a thousand internet warriors,used to be 'bad-ass'. No. Vampires used to be leaky.

They are spirits, characters, identities that cannot be contained within the useful boxes that society and morality would teach us. They are death leaking into life, sexual desire seeping into the virginal bed. They are a combination of hysterical grief and lust. The folkloric ghouls, squeezing bloated from their graves, dripping blood from rotting maws, crawling back to infect those they beloved with the miasma of death and they are leaky in the extreme. If it is better to marry than to burn, traditional vampires reminded people of the destructive power of desire which had no respect for the proper sacraments, for holy days, for the fact that marriage lasts only until death. Like corruption, like the pox, the vampires trickle in to any crack left in the vessel – any invitation, any little flaw in your armour of hygiene and righteousness.

Yes, newsflash, vampires are about sex. No, not only about sex, of course, but it plays a major part. They are about morality, about corruption, about disease. They are about damnation and sin. They were created in a culture that saw no clear distinction between spiritual, moral and physical cleanliness. What better way to reject one's spiritual nature than to remain on earth in physical form? What better way to spread damnation than to crawl from your grave and corrupt your spouse, your children, your family - those connected to them through bodily means.

As much as from medical ignorance, from fear of illness, the myth of the vampire arises from fears of intimacy, of the way an 'earthly' bond can override the moral strictures of community and faith. It has its foundation in the obsessive attachment that strictures of religion and custom are intended to contain. Vampires were unreasonable, unreasoning in their appetites. They put human interaction before the law of God.

In the head/body, male/female dichotomy, these are female flaws, female traits. Whatever their gender, vampires were codified as female, as the the body, and as such, they leak.

What I've been reading: Several Perceptions, Affinity, The Picture (and Confessions) of Dorian Gray

Not a big fan of these new covers

 There are some things in this world which become increasingly rare, some pleasures which one has a finite capacity to enjoy.

Angela Carter is one of those writers whom I wish I could delete from my memory so that I had the pleasure of discovering her work all over again - an impossibility which raises the question: what sort of person would I be had I not read Carter at a formative age?

Still, Several Perceptions was delicious. It was not what I would term 'greater Carter' - not Nights at the Circus, or Passion of a New Eve. It is a more realist work than these, resembling Love in both in its motifs and concerns, but it is a novel more tender, and, lacking Love's element of Grand Guignol, rather sharper, too. The miracles, the archetypes that you encounter, have something of the aggressive quality of Carter's critical writing, the edge of satire to them stronger than Love's more tortured protagonists can muster.

Once again, Carter proves her continued relevance to modern feminism, saying things that needed to be said then and have since been forgotten and thus need to be said again. As I would expect, it challenges the reader, a series of blows that unsettle, unsettle again, but there is an element of self-consciousness her later work lacks. The Carter of Several Perceptions does not draw you in, does not seduce you. There is something cold, a little defensive here.

The writing, it goes without saying, was sublime.

There, that's the required amount of fangirling done for the morning. Shall I do some overtime?

No, I shall be good. I did really love Sarah Water's Affinity, though. One of those fabulous books where I worked out exactly what was going on, but still read the last volume of the novel in about two hour's worth of bated breath intensity. Water's has a very special ability to bring late nineteenth century England - particularly London - to life, and she uses this formidable talent to tell queer stories that are compelling, compassionate and, if I'm honest, magical.

Affinity is the tale of the visits a grieving spinster makes to the women of Millbank prison and her growing 'affinity' with a spiritualist incarcerated for assault and fraud. It is part mystery, part romance. Not the least of its achievements is the fact that although the two main characters do nothing more than hold hands, it is one of the most sizzlingly sexy books I have read in a very long time.

Seriously, it was hot. Like, "I'm blushing as I read this because there are other people in the room," hot. It's Waters' knowingness that does this, her sly, careful invocation of modern sensibilities, of modern subtext. We know what's going on, even if the characters don't. And the characters... well, maybe they aren't so innocent of the implications, after all.

And that ending!

Wow.


So, from a sizzling, scandalous book set in queer London at the end of the nineteenth century, I take you to a sizzling, scandalous book set in queer London at the end of the nineteenth century. It's not that I haven't read The Confessions of Dorian Gray before now - I just felt like doing it again.

I blame that Waters woman.

Naturally, a good friend on Twitter heard my complaints about my old, first year annotated 'Penguin £1 Classics' edition and pointed me in the direction of this (Amazon link), and suffice to say I want, I want, I want. Still, impressions.

What surprised me most was how boyish Gray seems, and not just in the early part of the novel. He is forever throwing himself down on divans, turning his back, stamping his metaphorical foot. It is not simply his body which is preserved in the first flush of the twenties, his character remains self-centred, passionate, thoughtlessly cruel.

And just as he does not age, does not grow, nor does he ever self define. He remains so very malleable, a conduit for Wooton's words, Hallward's art. In the first and second chapter, all they do is give him orders. Their power over him remains - stay still, Dorian, think this, Dorian. Be beautiful. Make your life art. So he does, of course, and in doing so he simply becomes a mode of expression for others.

Does that absolve him, to some extent?

More interesting: can he change? Can he redeem himself?

And so I will stray away from books, because I've spent a lot of time lately listening to a lot of Big Finish's The Confessions of Dorian Gray.

And doesn't he just look the part?

If you chaps don't know who Big Finish are, they are the guys who do the Doctor Who audios, one of the spin-offs from the show that kept dedicated fans happy between the '96 movie and the 2005's Rose. Since the airing of Night of the Doctor they are canon. At their best, they are also sublime.

Big Finish also make a number audio adventures based upon other cult TV shows, literary characters and occasionally just some stunning original drama. The Confessions of Dorian Gray is, of course, their take on the novel I have just reread.

I was a little dubious about these dramas. The character of Dorian has such cultural cachet with a certain class of young person, among whom I am willing to number myself. How quickly will sensationalism have its sway? How much is going to be 'immortal Dorian' fanwank?

Well, the jury's out, I'm afraid. The dialogue is fantastic - sharp, witty and with some wonderfully underhand references to the novel. Gray is played to near-enough perfection by Alexander Vlahos - who captures that pettish allure that makes Dorian so attractive, so dangerous. But the quality of the stories varies, perhaps too greatly.  

Generally it is a wonderful, sexy horror romp through recent history, The Houses In Between getting honourable mention for being legitimately terrifying, but it veers too much towards the 'eldritch horror being dismissed by Dorian talking at it angrily' that seems a repeated motif in the series. The set-up, the characters, are perfect - the plotting too often a disappointment. There are a few mawkish, bum-notes (especially the last episode in the second season, which... I won't even), but there were also some triumphs where the actual possibilities of Dorian as a character - both psychological and narratively - were pushed. If you get a chance, listen to The Fallen King of Britain as it's fantastic - if a little insistent in its morality.

My only other complaint is that some of the writers appear to be working under the assumption Dorian is gay, which is unfortunate as he is one of the more famous bisexual literary characters we have. Still, whether or not that gives us a good name is another question entirely, of course.

Right, that's it. I've written way too much for one morning. Have a good week's reading!

What I've been reading: Jamaica Inn

Cue the drumroll, dim the lights as I say with tears in my eyes that this week I have managed to read a grand total of one novel.

Also, excuse me for a moment as I go, "Squeeeeeee!"

Because I damned well adore Daphne du Maurier. She is the is the first, the original, the shining light of those who take a genre and twist it until it starts to crack. She takes all the tropes, all the expectations of the Gothic (yay! Gothic!) or romance, or ghost story and makes them mainline a reality check. What results is terrifying, is rip-roaring, is as dark as treacle poured in your eyes during a power cut.

Dammit, yes, I'm enthusiastic because when push comes to shove, Daphne du Maurier writes for me and me alone.

That's how a good writer should make you feel, right?

Okay, some stuff

Just as Rebecca was a 'ghost story without a ghost', Jamaica Inn is essentially 'Udolpho with a main character you don't want to punch.' Like Emily, Mary is sent to live with a tyrannical uncle and a vain weak-willed aunt. Like in Udolpho we have isolation, we have coercion, we have dark deeds done under darknesses cover. Like in Udolpho, the driving force is the heroine's uncertainty, we are enthralled by terror, not horror, we fear what is suspected, not what is not seen. Unlike in Udolpho, however the sense of a strong but helpless person under continued stress is realistic and actually frightening. With Emily, you got the impression she'd act like that in a suburban house if she didn't like the colour of the wallpaper, but Mary Yellan is no delicate scion of a noble house. As a piece of psychological realism, Jamaica Inn is unsettling, as a work of Gothic, it is sublime.

Alright, it isn't perfect, but it's fabulous. Go read it. Go read it now.