Saturday, June 20, 2020
Star Trek Story, Myth and Arcs Podcast Episode 8: The House of Quark episode breakdown
Book Review: The Boatman's Daughter by Andy Davidson
The Boatman's Daughter by Andy Davidson
Paperback, 416 pages
Published
February 11th 2020
by MCD X Fsg Originals
In 2017 Andy Davidson's In the Valley of the Sun inspired many well deserved hyperbolic reviews from readers such as myself. In 2017 It was my second favorite only behind Chad Stroup's Secrets of the Weird. Many reviewers were hailing Davidson as the next big discovery. I think the horror genre had not had such consensus on a debut since Nick Cutter's the Troop. I was not above it in my review I said it was a "southern Gothic that is like the movie Near Dark if it was written by Cormac McCarthy. The official statements by the publisher makes that Macarthy comparison as well as Joe Hill and Anne Rice. Hill sure, but Anne Rice not so much for me. Hell, I see more in common with True Detective writer Nic Pizzalto's books that any of those three."
I am aware comparisons to Cormac McCarthy could cut two ways. He is the master of the Southern gothic dark narrative while writing gorgeous prose. All those things could and will be said of Davidson. His novels are more direct horror than anything McCarthy ever did. I know those who define horror as narrow as possible don't consider Blood Meridian or Child of God horror but no mistakes will be made with Andy Davidson.
I hesitated to talk about this in my review of In the Valley of the Sun, but I don't think the experience can be ruined. Davidson's debut was very much a vampire novel although that word is never once used. There is an interpretation of that novel that doesn't include the famous blood suckers but I think it is pretty clear.
This new novel appears to be carrying forward a theme of classic horror movie tropes done with a literary and southern gothic feel. The Boatman's Daughter is a tale of mid-south drug runners and witchcraft. If I was elevator pitching this to Hollywood I would say it is a cross between the Jeff Nichols movie Mud and Midsummer. That is just to explain the tone.
This novel is the story of Miranda whose father is a drug runner going up and down the rivers and channels of rural Arkansas by boat delivering drugs. When her father is killed Miranda has to grow up fast and take on his jobs. Most of the action takes place ten years on. Miranda has to deal with a rogue's gallery of redneck criminals, a gross preacher and supernatural forces centered around a coven housed at a place called Sabbath house.
The noir elements are underlined by the quickly drawn but dynamic characters who establish themselves quickly in the story. The prose uses beautiful flourish to give the setting a sweaty lived-in feeling, all these elements are needed to give Miranda's world depth. That is why the more outlandish horror moments work so well.
I enjoyed the Boatman's Daughter but it was not the lightning bolt to my system that In the Valley of the Sun was. That was a total and complete game-changer. This book establishes that we can look forward to a career full of these powerful novels of high-class horror and sign me up every time.
Friday, June 12, 2020
Book Review: Outre' by D.Harlan Wilson
Outré by D. Harlan Wilson
Paperback, 126 pages
Expected publication: November 1st 2020 by Raw Dog Screaming Press
D. Harlan Wilson is an author I have reviewed probably eight times in the eleven years I have been reviewing books for this blog. In 2008 he won the first-ever Wonderland award for Bizarro fiction for this totally insane novel Dr. Identity which I always mention. The book is one of the most hilarious science fiction novels I ever read. It is one part Philip K Dick and another part Monty Python. Of all the voices working the spaces between Science Fiction, bizarro, absurdism, and literary fiction no one is surfing all those waves like DHW.
On the surface Wilson is not my type of writer, I am a structure and conventional style nerd. What does appeal to me about Wilson's work is I also love weird, and totally gonzo insane concepts. My favorite stuff is the work that balances those two things but this is not about what I like, in this review I want to convince you that if you like weird and out-there stuff you need D. Harlan Wilson in front of your eyeballs.
Wilson could give a fuck about rules, this is not a three-act structure or a narrative that would be taught by a stuffy English professor. Wilson has a weird mind and this book has a concept and setting but within that framework, Wilson is letting the funk out of his mind without limitations. For me, one of the best parts is that I am always laughing when reading this man's books.
This novel is weird, perhaps not as weird as Wilson's last book The Psychotic Dr. Schreber which is 150 pages of insanity. This was a tight concept inspired by a real-life psychopath - A habit Wilson has gotten into over the years. He has written surreal biographies of noted figures including Hitler.
Outre' on the other hand is a return of sorts to bizarro Sci-fi, influenced heavily by the biocritical book he recently wrote about J.G. Ballard. I am not stretching to make this connection on page 15: "Overpopulation has rendered the surface of the earth an exoskeleton of Ballardian highrises." The book is set in a landscape that just screams like parts of Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. It has that same kind of schiz-flow but with an updated middle finger lifted to the current media landscape.
Now here I have to admit that I have not read Moby Dick since I struggled through it in school but there are many elements of Melville's classic woven in here that probably flew over my head. The thing is That when you read a D.Harlan Wilson novel many concepts will make that journey. You have to accept that you are not on the same plane of existence with the author and just enjoy that you get a glimpse into the strange place between the man's ears.
There are many targets of the modern mass media that get attention from Oprah to film directors. Warner Herzog, David Lynch, and Stanly Kubrick all have fun cameos. The line in the book that hit close to home was near the end. "As such, the presence of zombies in literature is reduced to books only read by their authors - which constitutes the bulk of contemporary fiction." Ouch.
Outre' is a must-read for D. Harlan Wilson fans, and weird absurdist fiction fans. Science Fiction and PKD fans I think you will enjoy this. I certainly think you'll laugh. One more thing for my PK Dickheads - Professor Wilson is one of us.
Certainly, check out his episode on our show:
Star Trek Story Myth and Arc Podcast: Hardcore Vocalist Star Trek panel!
On this episode of Star Trek Story, Myth and Arcs a long and fun discussion about all things Trek with a very unique panel. Each of my guests was the lead vocalist in hardcore bands, the most intense offshoot of punk rock. This show includes our Trek origins, favorite shows, movies, and Captains. We also debate the Trek movies, the first season of Picard, and much more.
Guests include:
Dan O’Mahony – vocalist of many classic bands like No for An Answer, Carry Nation, 411, Speak 714, Done Dying, and at the moment Shiner’s Club. Dan is also a great writer and he loves the Motion Picture and has the hottest takes of the panel.
Ryan Downey – vocalist of Hardball and Burn It Down. A music and movie journalist Ryan hosts several podcasts including the Metallica podcast Speak and Destroy. Ryan is a total nerd for behind the scene facts.
Issa Diao – Vocalist of DC area sarcastic hardcore legends Good Clean Fun. Issa is also a writer and director and sees more movies in one year than most people do in their lifetime.
Tom 'Red' Ranger - Vocalist of the Syracuse hardcore bands Eternal Youth and Attitude. Currently is fronting a band named Popular Music. He and Issa ould have a posi-off but Tom is one of my best friends and the first person I call after I see a new Trek or Star Wars movie.
Book Review: The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad + Podcast
Paperback, 255 pages
SF rediscovery series #5
Published October 1977 by Avon Books (first published 1972)
This is a really weird book to review. This is a deeply weird and misunderstood book that is both a work of genius and a steaming pile of shit at the same time. I mean Norman Spinrad who wrote it is the underrated genius and he knew full well that he was was taking a literary dump.
It is one of those ideas punk rockers have all the time it is very much like when band dudes sit around and say "wouldn't be hilarious if we did this insane band that pissed people off". Some remain jokes like the Anthrax guys doing Stormtroopers of Death sometimes they become serious bands like Vegan Reich and Racetraitor. (Look them up ) Anyhoo Norman Spinrad if you don't know is a progressive anarchist science fiction writer who in the early '70s was living in England. He and his friend editor and author Michael Moorcock were talking about how you construct a Sword and Sorcery novel. It occurred to Spinrad that the very nature of pulp sci-fi in the era was in need of a little satire, well a very big satire.
The really weird thing is that most satires are funny, they operate with tongue in cheek and are fun. Sci-fi has a long tradition of the humorous satire from Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants, Vonnegut, and probably most famous in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy. Plenty of Sci-fi satire is laugh out loud funny but this satire is played very seriously. The idea was what if Hitler wrote a space opera?
Spinrad once said "There is something deeply disturbing in the congruence between the commercial pulp action-adventure formula and the Ubermensch in jackboots" It is a deeply serious story in the eyes of the author Adolf Hitler, you see inside the Iron Dream is an experiment of alternate history with a novel inside it called Lord of the Swastika and Spinrad wrote it imagining that Hitler had become a pulp Sci-fi writer and not an evil dictator.
How interesting for a Science Fiction writer, who would twice serve as the president of SFWA to blister the genre with such a scathing meta commentary but it is genius in many ways. The problem is the Hitler novel is a slog and tough read. Hitler even with help from Spinrad is a terrible sci-fi author. As interesting as the meta-commentary is the Hitler novel is damn awful. I mean it was meant to be a fascist fantasy of a dying madman. In this history, the Nazi party fell apart and Adolf like many Germans immigrated to New York where he became an illustrator and a sci-fi writer with a cult following. In this fake history, Hitler died soon after writing the novel and was given the 1954 Hugo award (That in our reality that went to Bradbury for Farahenheit 451), and fans cos-played his thousand-year Reich at sci-fi cons.
So yeah Lord of the Swastika is a terrible novel but the Iron Dream is a complicated work of genius bound to confuse those who don't look past the surface. It is purple prose dialed to 11 on the juvenile fascist machismo scale. The thing is it is intentional and Spinrad commenting on the genre of pulp adventure like Robert Howard is totally savage and great.
Spinrad said "What drew me to write it was that the economic and political reasons for the rise of Nazi Germany never convinced me. Hitler was a media genius, and Nazism a psychosexual phenomenon. … Like a certain species of “heroic fantasy.” Hitler was a big fan of Wagnerian Opera at a time when “Space Opera” had a big fandom too."
So you see The Iron Dream is 2-star read, a 5-star experiment of political satire and that leaves me feeling it should get a 4-star average. The novel ends with a fictional afterword about Hitler and a very critical review of the novel. In many ways that is all you need to read. This message would probably have worked better as a novella or a short story - with Fictional biographical parts of Hitler's alternative life mixed in.
That would have been easier on the reader but it would have hurt the point Spinrad was trying to make. This is a bitter pill and it is going to taste bad going down. It has too. There is a key point on the last page of the essay it is the most important point.
“For Feric Jaggar is essentially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior. He would be able to manipulate the surface of social reality by projecting his own pathologies upon it, but he would never be able to share in the inner communion of interpersonal relationships. Such a creature could give a nation the iron leadership and sense of certainty to face a mortal crisis, but at what cost? Led by the likes of a Feric Jaggar, we might gain the world at the cost of our souls. No,”
Dickheads Podcast episode recording soon should be out before July.
Sunday, June 7, 2020
Star Trek Story, Myth and Arcs Episode 5: Why Discovery Should Have Started on Ep.3!
In this episode Star Trek Story, Myth and Arcs, we explore the third episode of Star Trek Discovery. It is my feeling that the series should have started in episode three. There are several storytelling fundamentals that back up that argument. So give this essay episode a spin and let me know – You do you agree or disagree?
Also one correction Avika Goldsman did direct the episode but the script was written by Gretchen Berg, Aaron Harberts, and Craig Sweeny.
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Book Review: Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher, Introduction by F. Paul Wilson
Rocket to the Morgue (Sister Ursula #2) by Anthony Boucher, Introduction by F. Paul Wilson
Paperback, 264 pages
Published July 2019 by American Mystery Classics (first published 1942)
I took an interesting route to this book. Anthony Boucher whose real name was William Anthony Parker White wrote books and edited magazines in more than one genre. It is one thing to have had such an impact in one genre that awards and conventions are named after you, but amazing to have impacted two genres. Boucher is known for being a godfather of American mystery novels but it was his impact on Science Fiction that got my attention. I will admit a few years ago Boucher was not a name I knew. Then when my friends and I started the Dickheads Philip K Dick podcast a running joke grew over the episodes. Shout out to Tony, because his influence on the life of Philip K Dick was profound.
We constantly saw evidence of influence.
Two editors had the biggest impact on PKD. Don Wollheim published most of Phil's novels and when talking about his career and the genre Phil always gave Don the credit for being not just one of but the MOST important person in Science fiction. Boucher, on the other hand, was more important to Phil on a personal as well as professional level. It is not just that he bought Phil's first short story Roog, but Tony inspired Phil to write Science Fiction in the first place. The two met and became friends in Berkley when this novel was already a re-printed classic.
Philip Dick was working in a record store and Boucher was a regular, picking up vinal to play on his local opera radio show. Phil had dismissed the idea of writing sci-fi as kid stuff and it was Boucher that showed him that you could be a smart reader/ writer of the genre. It wasn't just pulpy kids stuff like Buck Rodgers. As a long time fan of A.E. Van Vogt Phil knew that but needed Boucher's encouragement to write. Boucher also hosted a bay area writers group that included Dick, Marian Zimmer Bradley, and Ray Nelson among others.
This group of friends would gather and talk about writing and critique each others work. Boucher of course had experience with a group like this and they were the basis of the novel Rocket To the Morgue.
In 1940 Boucher and his wife were living in LA, and Boucher became a member of a writers group called the Minana literary society. This was a real writer's group that at the time was hosted by Robert Heinlein, and included L. Ron Hubbard, Henry Kutter and his wife C.L. Moore to name a few. Boucher used this group and real-life Science fiction figures like Forrest J Ackerman and John W. Campbell as characters in this murder mystery.
Keep in mind this novel was released under the name HH Holmes (yes the same name as the less famous at the time first American serial killer) Boucher made himself a character in the book as well.
The details of the group are thinly veiled indeed Austin Carter is clearly Heinlein, D. Vance Wimpole is Hubbard, Halstad Pyn is likely the future founder of Famous Monsters Fores J Ackerman who in 1940 was an agent. Don Stuart who is mentioned but not in the action is John W. Campbell.
So you see This book is a work of genius and super important to the history of two genres.
It is important because:
1. Boucher tells a fascinating locked room mystery with interesting characters.
2. Boucher comments on a meta-level about the personalities of important figures in the history of science fiction. It is a chance to get to know these figures.
3. Boucher tells a great story and still manages to comment on the Science Fiction genre at a time that it was in infancy. Confined to pulp magazines and tiny convention halls. Science fiction novels didn't get hardcover books so he was also introducing the world to the genre. Just two years before he approached a major mystery magazine to open his own SF magazine that still publishes today 50 plus years after his death.
4. A mystery novel sure but the most recent edition which features a great addition in the form of an excellent introduction by F.Paul Wilson makes sense to be shelved next to classic non-fiction books on the genre. Why because you'll learn levels of the history reading it.
So the actual story is a fun one. The heir to the literary estate of a writer who wrote popular supernatural detective novels Hilary Foulkes has several enemies. In 1941 Hollywood wants to make his father's stories into movies, and famous Science Fiction writers want to continue his work, but he has refused their efforts, after several attempts at his life the suspicions are directed at the sci-fi group. The action follows a Detective Terrance Marshall and Sister Mary Ursula, a nun of the Sisters of Martha of Bethany who has always dreamed of being a cop. This is the second Sister Ursula book but I have no idea if I am missing out on background about her.
The Mystery at the heart of the novel is fun, but it was not what interested me. The commentary and history of the Sci-fi genre were enough for me to make this a great read. The fun story was just a great bonus. As F.Paul Wilson author of The Keep and the Repairmen Jack Series said in his introduction "It made me want to run up to every science fiction fan I know and shove a copy at them, shouting "you have to read this!"
I agree this book is a must-read for scholars of the genre.
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