Locus, March 2013 Read online

  •

  In 2010, Glen Hirshberg published the short story ‘‘Like Lick ’Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey’’, one of the most original recent additions to the bloated horror subgenre of vampire fiction. The tale begins like a Thelma and Louisa road-romp with two sassy, twenty-ish female friends bantering with one another in a fast-food joint they’ve just pulled into. Something somber and unspoken clearly is driving their repartee and, near the end, it emerges that the two women are young mothers, recently vampirized, who have left their newborns in the hands of caretakers and fled. Sophie, the more impulsive of the two, is desperate to see her child again. Natalie, the more firmly grounded, knows that any further maternal contact will end with them preying on their own children. The mood of the narrative turns on a dime from merriment to pathos, and the effect is wrenching.

  ‘‘Like Lick ’Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey’’ appears virtually intact as the concluding chapter of the first half of Motherless Child, Hirshberg’s novel-length elaboration of the story’s theme. The chapters leading up to it give the backstory that wasn’t crucial for the shorter version’s mechanics, but that adds texture and complexity to the longer tale.

  Sophie and Natalie are best friends and single mothers, living dead-end lives in Charlotte NC. One evening, they draw the attention of a shadowy young bar singer who goes by the name of The Whistler. When they wake up the next morning, The Whistler is gone and they’re both vampire-bitten. Realizing the threat they now pose, Natalie hands the children off to her mother, Jess, tells her to flee, and warns, ‘‘Whatever you do… don’t let me find you.’’

  Though bitten, Natalie and Sophie aren’t full-fledged vampires, yet. In order to ‘‘finish’’ the job that The Whistler began, they both need to drink someone’s blood. Whereas Sophie is all too willing to indulge her cravings, Natalie resists, and that poses problems for The Whistler, who is convinced that Natalie is his ‘‘Destiny.’’ Hoping to force her into the un-life he plans to share with her, he uses the one sure lure that he knows will draw her to him, setting up an emotionally tense standoff at the novel’s end.

  The different groups of characters who populate the novel allow Hirshberg to explore the meaning of his title from a variety of angles. Certainly it refers to the relationship between Sophie and Natalie and their children. Natalie is a perfectly drawn, sympathetic study of a mother’s worst nightmare: the realization that the best thing she can do for the child she loves is to abandon him. At one point, she calls up the painful memory of her son because, ‘‘She wanted to feel the full force of emptiness there, where her child had been. To know it was permanent. She needed to know that, if she hoped to go on.’’ But there are other mother/child relationships in the novel as well: between The Whistler and Mother, the woman who has been his companion for countless years and who resents the loss of him to Natalie, as well as between Natalie and Jess, who were never close while Natalie was growing up, and who are never closer than in the novel’s final, heartbreaking moments.

  ‘‘Like Lick ’Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey’’ will strike any reader as a perfectly self-contained short story. It’s all the more extraordinary, then, that Hirshberg has found nuances in the tale to explore and develop at greater length without making Motherless Child seem overextended. Both stories are signature explorations of the emotionally devastating horrors that can arise out of the most intimate interpersonal relationships.

  •

  In ‘‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’’, the next-to-the last story in Yoko Ogawa’s newly translated collection of short stories, Revenge (originally published in Japan in 1998), the narrator is given a book entitled ‘‘Afternoon at the Bakery’’ by a strange woman whom he meets at resort hotel and who claims to have written it. Not coincidentally, the book bears the same title as the first story in Ogawa’s collection, and it tells the same story. The narrator’s response to it is pretty much Ogawa’s perfect self-appraisal of her book: ‘‘The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again.’’

  Revenge is very appropriately subtitled ‘‘Eleven Dark Tales.’’ None of its stories are overtly supernatural (although one, ‘‘Sewing for the Heart’’, features an anatomical anomaly so bizarre that it may as well be), but most have their macabre moments, and all have a gloominess that ranges from the subtle to the oppressive. It becomes clear by the second tale in the book that the stories are meant to be read in sequence: characters that play a peripheral role in one story serve as main characters in other stories, and events glanced over in one are elaborated in another or presented from a different perspective. The cumulative impact of the stories as they echo one another and circle back to a point of origin is the book’s great achievement.

  ‘‘Afternoon at the Bakery’’ begins placidly, with its narrator describing a trip she makes to a bakery on her son’s birthday to buy him a favorite cake. The bakery seems unattended, and as she waits with another person for service, events begin to seem slightly off-kilter. The reason why becomes clear when she is asked how old her son is. Her simple, heartbreaking reply: ‘‘Six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead.’’ The story’s remaining few pages detail her son’s tragic death, its unhinging of her emotions and destruction of her marriage, and the ritual that it prompts her to indulge in every year.

  Ogawa deploys this technique in several of the stories. In the middle of the narrative, she explodes a revelation that explains the peculiar behavior of a character or the weird turn that events are taking. Her streamlined, unornamented prose style makes these revelations seem all the more shocking. Sometimes, they come at the story’s end, in the thunderclap fashion typical of much horror fiction. In ‘‘Old Mrs. J’’, the owner of an apartment building, who keeps a garden in its court, begins bringing one of her tenants carrots grown in it shaped like human hands. In the story’s closing paragraphs, investigators search the garden after her death and make a gruesome discovery that explains both the disappearance of the woman’s husband and the unnatural attributes of the vegetables.

  All of the stories have an air of surreality, but some are darker than others. In ‘‘Sewing for the Heart’’, a woman who was born with her heart outside of her chest hires a handbag maker to create a special custom sheath for it. The bag-maker becomes so obsessed with serving her that he refuses to accept her decision to have her condition corrected surgically. The story ends with a grotesque parody of the bag-maker capturing the heart of his beloved. In ‘‘Welcome to the Museum of Torture’’, a woman’s tour of a museum devoted to torture devices inspires her plans for revenge against the lover who recently rejected her.

  Each of the stories in Revenge implies that there are often darker motives and machinations just beneath the placid surface of ordinary life. As these tales interconnect and reveal the intertwining of their characters’ lives, their effects ripple outward to suggest an entire society or world of barely controlled impulses and eccentricities. The subtlety with which these stories fulfill Ogawa’s greater ambitions for them makes for a nicely unnerving read.

  –Stefan Dziemianowicz

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: DIVERS HANDS

  Ancient, Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam

  Radiant Days, Elizabeth Hand

  Hysteria, Megan Miranda

  The Complete John Thunstone, Manly Wade Wellman

  Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, Jonathan Oliver, ed.

  KAREN BURNHAM

  Ancient, Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam (Aqueduct Press 978-1933500966, $18.00, 272pp, tp) May 2012.

  In her introduction to Kiini Ibura Salaam’s debut collection, Ancient, Ancient, Nisi Shawl mentions her response to a question about the effect of the Afro-diaspora on genre literature: ‘‘Everything is going to get a lot sexier.’’ The very first story in this collection, ‘‘Desire’’, proves that right out of the gate. A delightfu
l folkloric tale, it tells of a pregnant woman, who normally thinks more about work than about sex, being infused with the power of a god’s desire. The story is told in alternating sections, with Sené’s sections in normal text and the god Faru’s sections set off in brackets. There’s a lovely sense of two independent tales colliding suddenly then veering off again, leaving each confused in the other’s wake. Sené reconnects with herself and her husband, and Faru ends up restored but slightly humbler. It’s a real charmer of a story to open the collection.

  The most interesting thing, however, is how different all the stories are from one another. Salaam moves easily between genres, themes, and voices. Her stories work in a variety of different registers. Immediately following the opening fable, there are three linked stories (‘‘Of Wings, Nectar, & Ancestors’’, ‘‘MalKai’s Last Seduction’’, and ‘‘At Life’s Limits’’) that take a science fictional tone. Aliens come to Earth in secret to feed off the life energies of certain targets. In the first story, WaLiLa is a fairly young alien on her mission, and her point of view is represented in all lower-case. She doesn’t speak grammatically, and acts intuitively. In the final story she is more aware and accomplished, and her narrative takes on a more authoritative tone, with proper capitalization to boot. And while I started to worry for a bit that the stories were privileging heterosexual relationships over other possibilities, ‘‘MalKai’s Last Seduction’’ allayed my fears.

  One of the only problems that I have with the collection is manifested in ‘‘At Life’s Limits’’, the final story in that loose trilogy. It feels more like the beginning of a longer story than the end of a cycle, opening out into a new realm of potential without exploring the new territory. A few other stories here struck me as story fragments rather than fully fleshed-out tales, including the title story ‘‘Ancient, Ancient’’ and ‘‘Ferret’’, both less than six pages long. Looking at the publication history, these are also two of the earliest stories in the volume, appearing in 2002 and 2003 respectively, while the stories here run from 1996 to 2008 of the ones that aren’t original to the collection (ten of the 13 stories have been published elsewhere).

  In keeping with Shawl’s pronouncement about things getting sexier, Salaam also tends toward a very visceral mode of writing, and when her stories turn towards horror they get very nightmarish. ‘‘Battle Royale’’ is a story that skips across different scenarios as a grandfather tries to teach a wayward grandson a lesson. In each vignette you get a very tactile sense of the feelings and landscapes, whether it is Aztec vs. European combat, dying of exposure in a desert, or hanging on as a mutant on a far future space transport. The blend of fantasy, history, and SF is very well done.

  Another story, while more conventional in genre, stood out to me as the best of the collection. ‘‘Rosamojo’’ is a story about incest and child abuse, from the point-of-view of the victim. She is abused by her father but calls upon magical protection in order to prevent a repeat occurrence. However, though empowered by her magic, she is in no way unscarred by the experience, and the consequences last a very long time. It’s one of the most focused stories of the collection, and I found it to be an excellent examination of several dimensions of abuse.

  Overall I was impressed by the range and command of voice shown throughout the stories here. Whether tackling far-future SF, generation starships, oracular magical women, child abuse, or hidden aliens, the voice of the narration and the characters always seemed spot on. The stories also hit me on an emotional and visceral level. If some of the stories seemed incomplete or fragments of a larger story, that’s easy to forgive. It’s better to wish that a story was longer than to think that it has overstayed its welcome.

  –Karen Burnham

  GWENDA BOND

  Radiant Days, Elizabeth Hand (Viking 978-0670011353, $17.99, 272pp, hc) April 2012.

  Few things hold as much appeal for the artsy teenager as stories of rabble-rousing, society-defying artists in times past. And yet, this is relatively unexplored ground in YA fiction – with a few notable exceptions, such as Simmone Howell’s Notes from the Teenage Underground and Nikki Grimes’ Bronx Masquerade. In fact, I could think of no immediate examples that incorporate fantasy elements into their tales of young artists finding their way (though I’m sure there must be a few). Now, with Radiant Days, Elizabeth Hand has written a beautiful, strange novel of the fantastic, which shows us two artists emerging from their own very specific – and yet also unexpectedly overlapping – times.

  In 1978, Merle Tappitt has just fled an abusive, poverty-ridden backwater childhood for DC and the more bohemian poverty of being broke in art school. Taken under the wing of an older married woman, Clea, who begins to educate Merle in the ways of the world and the body, while encouraging her art and playing model, Merle is beginning to find her voice as an artist… which, of course, gets her kicked out. Art school is too rigid for the art she’s drawn to create. On a trip to New York, Merle shoves away Clea’s attempts to sell her work to a famous art doyenne, and becomes entranced by the possibilities of graffiti after seeing SAMO’s tags all over town. But Merle doesn’t believe in the ‘‘Same Old Shit’’ point-of-view; the tag she adopts is Radiant Days, an eye and a sun.

  In 1870, 16-year-old Arthur Rimbaud traverses France, wanting to escape the clutches of his controlling mother. Attempting to travel to Paris without having paid the full fare, he ends up in prison – for a relatively brief, but eye-opening stay – and then travels the countryside and visits other towns. All the while he’s deciding what he makes of the world and describing it in brilliant bursts of sharp-edged yet gorgeous poetry. For a good while, we experience Merle and Arthur’s lives progressing in alternating segments, with no hint of when and how they will overlap. But when a gifted musician who is also a tramp appears alongside bodies of water, time begins to seem more fluid – a river just like the rivers in the text. And when both our young artists seek refuge in a lockhouse, traces of art on the walls or making art on the walls, Merle and Arthur’s lives cross, bringing Arthur into Merle’s 1978. Hand is not interested in the expected, and these two spend a life-changing and yet brief time together. There are mysterious carp lost, but not quite, an instrument that looks like bone, and a tramp who may be something far older than he seems.

  It’s difficult to capture how perfectly attuned to this story of art and artists the prose Hand uses to render it is. But by capturing vivid texture and detail, we feel the world as close around Merle and Arthur as they do – and with an artist’s vantage. ‘‘But I now began to see how surreal a stoplight was, strobing from amber to red to green. Plastic bottles, the acid-green wrapper from a bag of potato chips, a broken syringe – all these things are strange and even beautiful, if you look at them long enough.’’ At one point, Merle has a realization: ‘‘Magic is something you make. And if you don’t make something and leave it behind, it’s not just that it’s gone. You’re gone.’’ This is a time travel story about the connection and influence artists and their work can have, real and personal and lasting ones. And so the story of these two very specific young people becomes universal, exciting, and meaningful.

  Give this book to the rebellious, young artists you know, because it could have a profound effect. If Hand’s novel thumbs its nose at many of the usual conventions observed in YA – the pace is deliberate, the prose layered, the fantasy entering the story later rather than sooner, and the sense of adult perspective at the end (along with a last perfect twist) – it also captures perfectly that YA sense of individuals becoming who they truly are through the crucible of story. That is not to say that only teens should check out this book. Hand has written a rare and beautiful novel that feels like it’s for people interested in the process and impact of art, not just for any one certain group of them.

  •

  Hysteria, Megan Miranda (Walker 978-0802723109, $17.99, 336pp, hc) February 2013.

  ‘‘My mother hid the knife block.’’ So begins Megan Miranda’s arresting sopho
more novel Hysteria, a psychological thriller that fairly seeps with the sinister presence haunting protagonist Mallory. Whether that presence is real or not real (lights on, lights off, as protagonist Mallory sometimes thinks) is half the fun and all the creeping horror. Mallory, you see, recently killed her boyfriend. With a knife, in her family’s kitchen, in what the police have determined to be self-defense. But Mallory feels certain everyone from her parents to her boyfriend’s mother believe she could have gotten away, that Brian’s death wasn’t necessary.

  Mallory, meanwhile, is trying to keep it together while being threatened by Brian’s mother – who is unhinged by his death, so much so it requires a restraining order to keep her away from Mallory – shunned or worse by the other teens in town, and haunted by the dark feeling of the something that remains behind in the kitchen, a something she is certain is real. So when her parents ship her off to boarding school, she goes. Mallory’s voice is at once claustrophobic and terrified by the horror stalking her, and by the memories that surge up of the fateful night and the events leading up to it. She’s also funny. Two years earlier her mom said she’d go to boarding school ‘‘over my dead body.’’ Mallory notes: ‘‘Apparently, two years ago, my mother had lied. Apparently, any dead body would do.’’ The only person Mallory is sad to leave behind is her best friend Colleen, a rare and strong friendship that remains a close one even after Mallory leaves.

  But there’s no fresh start waiting for Mallory – what she did has followed her to prep school Monroe. Not just in the gossip of students (though there is plenty of that), but in the recurring late night boom boom boom of that thing, whatever it is, approaching, of finger-shaped bruises appearing on her body from a phantom grip, of the sense someone has been in her room and left everything just slightly off…. Her one ally becomes Reid, a boy who has feelings for her – and vice versa – and who she’s known since childhood as the son of her dad’s high school best friend. Reid fully believes Mallory is experiencing trauma and that she’s being targeted by other students for harassment. But can she share with him her concerns about things real and unreal? Can she tell him what she fears is really coming for her? And can she escape it before things go too far?