Review: Tumble by Trent Jamieson (Podcast)

Online at Pseudopod 74 25th January, 2008

I’m a big fan of podcasts, especially literary ones. I wack them on my ipod, then go for a walk around the burbs for an hour or two and come back well exercised and a little bit happier for having achieved two things at once. So when I discovered Pseudopod – a free horror podcaster – I thought I’d give it a try.

Horror is a genre I approach with trepidation. I’ve got to be in the mood to willingly stick with a character who, by dint of some twisted literary convention, is doomed. If I’m tempted to read horror, I look for stories that promise more than a vicarious shudder.

After listening to the first paragraph of Trent Jamieson’s Tumble with its juxtaposition of the fantastic and the believable (tiny cockroaches hissing in Mother Beet’s eyeball, perhaps irritated by the smoke of her cigarello) I knew I'd found something worth reading (or more accurately, listening to). The language is mature and convincing enough to give me more than one “aha” moment. When the narrator, Grieve, waxed philosophical, I knew exactly what he was on about, despite having been dropped into his strange and frightening world only minutes before.

Mother Beet is a scary crone in a world where demons run riot, where cities outside the main city (named Wish) are falling to ruin. Mother Beet’s son, Daniel, is even worse, a cold blooded murderer who has been known to eat the still-beating hearts of his victims. Grieve is ordered by Wish to eliminate Daniel and, although Grieve is no lawman at heart, he’s addicted to Wish and cannot refuse.

I found this story interesting because the horror works on two levels. In the big picture, there’s this science fictional world where people are literally addicted to a city that both nurtures and controls them. This is a neat statement about the way today’s city dwellers are addicted to and controlled by consumerism. It not only provides an unusual backdrop to the story, but also adds to the inevitable horror at the story’s conclusion.

On the second, more personal level, we have Grieve who is street-wise and driven, but terrified of the evil he chases. He must face it head on, no hesitation, no backing down. Even so, his success is not guaranteed even after the battle is over. That’s the trouble with evil. By the time I neared the end I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, things would work out for Grieve. But this is horror, right? Things do work out in horror, but not how you want.

Fortunately (for me) the gory bits are not overdone. Some is told with minimalist precision, enough to make me shudder but not enough to make me want to switch my ipod over to something a little less confronting. Other bits are told by evading the usual signifiers of violence and referring instead to peripheral happenings or memory. I found myself shocked by Mother Beet’s murder (told in flashback) almost as much as if I’d been shown it all in stream-of-consciousness detail.

Reading horror is one thing, listening to it is another. You absorb the words at a slower pace. There’s time to let them marinate and work up a stew of emotions. There’s inflexions and emphases that only a speaker can impart. Cheynne Wright’s voice is decidedly creepy in this podcast, and certainly adds a dark tone to an already dark story. After listening to the story twice (I walked 9 km during that time), I switched off and, for a few moments, felt a tad disorientated as if I'd returned from somewhere else. Suddenly, the Perth city skyline looked really pretty in sunlight.

Human v Inhuman II

Review: Pahwakhe by Gord Sellar

Online at fantasy magazine 21st january, 2008

Spoiler Warning: Maybe this is more of a critique than a review. I don't like spoilers, but found it hard to write about this story without giving (what some readers may think) too much away. I don't think I have, but I thought I'd warn you just in case.

A tale of paternal love that is undermined by selfishness and greed. A man forces his daughter, Pahwakhe, to marry a ghostly visitor: a musician who takes her away to a place beyond the limits of the living. A year later a child is born – part-human/part-ghost – but it does not fit into its ghostly father’s world, so Pahwakhe returns to her parents, hoping her child can fit in here. Human love, it turns out, has the potential to either save this child or destroy it.

Pahwakhe is told mostly in the form of flashback and from first person point of view. This works really well here because, by choosing to leave certain emotions unsaid, the narrator (Pahwakhe’s father) exposes his flaws. His tragic moments are often understated yet at the same time illuminated.

The story feels very much like a tale told by a fireside. It is framed by two scenes set in the present which serve firstly to foreshadow the conflict and lastly, to reinforce the magnitude of that conflict. The prose is sometimes stark, sometimes lyrical and filled with images of startling clarity:

The singing voices out on the water are moving, sad fiddles calling out like broken birds. They’re coming here. I never imagined them returning.

The setting has an unearthly feel to it, possibly because there is little in the way of description of the normal world. The reader senses that the village is somewhere in North America from keywords such as ‘longhouse’ and ‘chiefs’ and ‘pemmican’, however the lack of reference to any distinctive feature does not rule out that this story could also be set in Polynesia, perhaps on a volcanic stony beach. But this does not matter. What’s important is the overlap between the worlds of the living and the dead: the fog through which the visitors arrive, the unsettling music, the ghostly faces.

On my first reading, I wasn’t sure if the narrator’s claim that the visitors were ghosts was meant to be taken literally or not. It rings true with indigenous people’s first encounters with Europeans, where they believed that pale skinned people were returned spirits, where poor farming practices damaged the land. I like this ambiguity. It grounds the story in both the real and the fantastic. Not knowing what is really happening until later is more unsettling than being told outright.

Although the narrator often understates his emotions, he is clearly miserable. This misery can be felt through his observations, eg, the strangers’ words were “heavy like stones” followed up later with “I cannot find the words. They’re heavy on my tongue, too, now.” His strongest emotion however – the one he dwells on the most – is his yearning to possess first his daughter and then later, his grandchild. Disturbingly, it is not love or sadness or remorse that he articulates most clearly, but his need to possess. For me, this is yet another of the story’s strengths.

Interesting to note is that where the previous story I reviewed (How To Hide Your Heart by Deborah Coates) focuses on acknowledging one’s humanity as a means to survive, this story does the opposite by showing humanity in a far from ideal form. Rather than bring people together, it drives them apart.

If I say any more, I’ll give away the ending. Instead, go read it yourself. It’s a neat little story with a lot to say.

On Reviewing

This reviewing thing is a new experience for me. I’m new to the genre of fantasy, new to being a full-time writer/student. In the meantime, I’m just finding my feet – figuring out what’s new in fantasy literature, what’s old, what’s over-used, what’s different., what can and can’t be done. At this stage in my studies, I’m not sure. So most of my early reviews will not be taking historical aspects into consideration. I’ve yet to learn which themes have been done to death and how, what’s cliché and what’s not. I have a fair idea, but that’s all. I’ll need to read some more to make sure. Hopefully I’ll learn how to make old themes look original (if such a thing is possible). So right now I’m reading and reviewing purely for the pleasure of it. Purely for the story.

I’ve started by looking up Duotrope’s Digest (A Resource for Fiction Writers and Poets). This generated a long list of online fantasy magazines to sort through. Thus begins this current leg of my journey…

Human v Inhuman

Review: How To Hide Your Heart
by Deborah Coates

Online at Strange Horizons
21st January, 2008


Max is a hunter of ‘Things’: inhuman creatures (or maybe demons) that take the form of ‘not-zombies’, ‘not-vampires’, ‘not-wendigoes’. When not hunting, Max attempts to deny his own humanity by remaining homeless, indulging himself in brief liaisons with “girls whose hearts won't break.” When hunting, he is helped by people who do not understand what they are helping with.

Then he meets Beth. Plain, sloppily dressed, Beth’s only promising feature appears to be her prowess at driving cars. But Beth, it turns out, knows more about ‘Things’ than Max realizes. Max wants to use her for her skill and then forget her; but Beth is much more world-wise than she looks. Her connection with Max has the potential to make or break him.

There’s a lot I liked about this piece of urban fantasy. I liked the way the inhuman creatures mean different things to different people. The reader doesn’t really get to ‘see’ what they look like – or even understand what they are – but mostly ‘feels’ their effects: the fear they provoke and the deadly chase where the stakes are not exactly spelled out but are implied as being more than just a loss of life. Even in the story’s two violent encounters we see only darkness, shadows and claws. The only thing we are really sure of is that there’s going to be a battle.

Without the added strength provided by the tentative relationship between Beth & Max, I think this story would have ended up as just another ‘let’s go kill monsters’ story'. On the other hand, without the monsters, Beth and Max would never have connected, let alone found common ground. As unlikely as it seems (in Max’s mind), the two spark from the beginning, albeit reluctantly. This compelled me to read on and although the ending is by no means a resolution, it is certainly a satisfying exploration of human need struggling in the shadow of inhuman aspiration.

Reviewing

I'm certainly not a practiced reviewer, but I thought I'd have a go at writing one a couple of times a week. I'm pretty sure there's a handful of friends who are interested in reading and writing as much as I am. Satima? Helen? Sonia? Jessica? Anudhara?

Okay, so I'm blogging my thoughts on people's stories. I'm only going to write about the ones I like at this stage. Plus I'm currently learning about reading fantasy (in the past I've read mostly science fiction), so hopefully this will give me a better understanding. Did I tell you my thesis is about fantasy?

Oh...and if I don't review your story, it doesn't mean I didn't like it. There's way to many stories for me to blog them all, let alone read them :)

Online Alien Stories

No bushwalking today as we all baulked at getting wet. Though I don't mind the rain as I have a new rain jacket, guaranteed waterproof. But no one else was keen and, well, reading and writing is just as good.

Instead I messed around reading online fiction and was quite impressed with the stories I read on Strange Horizons. I like stories about aliens and thought two stories by a writer from Nova Scotia, Joanne Merriam, were excellent. Joanne is also a poet and some of her poems are up at her website and worth checking out. Two stories that I especially liked were Little Ambushes (about an alien who is visiting Earth in order to learn the basics of human art) and Harvest (an alien abduction story). Both are quite short and economical, a pleasure to read, and show a whole lot more than the sum of their parts.

I also liked The Girl From Another World by Leah Bobet which is more about alienation, but very nicely done.