Book Review: The Moth for the Star by James Reich

 

The Moth for the Star by James Reich

192 pages, Paperback

Published September, 2023 by 7.13 Books

 

One of the weird things about social media is becoming friends and feeling connected to folks you never met in the real world. The first time I recorded a podcast with James Reich we were talking about Barry Malzberg’s genius and his underrated science fiction novel Beyond Apollo. We share a love for very niche writers and styles of storytelling. I have always felt connected to James. His novel Song My Enemies Sing for one example is a very strange book that seems almost designed for my sensibilities. For one thing, it takes place on a very real and still unreal Mars. By real I mean one that exists two hundred percent in the imagination of readers of bygone pulp fiction Mars envisioned by Burroughs, Bradbury, Bradbury, Brackett, and of course Philip K. Dick. In our real universe, this Mars doesn’t exist but whatever.

 

Reich’s Mars is not too different from the lyrical surreal New York of the Great Depression in this novel. James Reich is a writer I greatly admire and as of a couple of weeks ago, I got to hang out with him in person and pick up a signed copy of this. Spending time with James was a highlight of the weekend but I assure you if I didn’t honestly like this novel, I would have just not finished it. I found this novel to be further proof that James Reich is a super underrated writer. You need to listen to me on this point.

 

 I am overdue to read this one, which I went into super blind. I trusted James and didn’t read the back cover, or ask him about it.  I knew the title was a reference to Poe, and that it was a quote from Fall of the House of Usher. I did need to google it to remember.

 

“It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above…”

― Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

 

Is it about the attraction to beautiful things that hurt us? I am not sure I want to try to answer something the novel makes us ponder. 

 

The Moth for the Star is part paranormal mystery, romance, and in subtle ways an alternate history that will fly over most heads, as nothing that happens is major global events. The story of Varmas and Campbell is globe-trotting, but in a way I didn’t see this happening in our past, I pictured a stylized slightly off-beat dark version of our past. The two main characters drink heavily to forget something, and for most of the novel, we don’t know what mystery they are trying to out run.

 

What makes this novel sing is the fine-tuned lyrical prose here I selected a paragraph at random as an example.

 

“If he could get up he might crawl to the living room and find a telephone to call Campbell, but his flesh held him down his blood let in his remorse would toil at him in the night. For now it floated threateningly across the surface of his being. Varmas dreamed of something like a dark star. Too late saw it plunging into the earth. Now he slid into that coffin of his unconscious where Campbell slept, his image of her waxwork warm from the cast her throat was lifted and dreaming, her mouth was open, as if to rainfall.”

 

This novel is filled with passages like this. If I can be critical of anything, it is the beauty of the prose distracted me from the story at times. That is a good problem to have in the same way that Liggotti for example builds such beautiful paragraphs that I can lose the narrative thread. This of course adds to the surreal feeling of the overall book. Feature not a bug. The characters are hiding from darkness and that is the mystery at the core, the answer is heartbreaking.

 

“The wasteland has found the city it always does I imagine.” he thought of the marionettes broken like eggshells, masonry falling like clotted blood, ancient scaffolding breaking away, and a vast column of dust rising over the yellow earth. “I'm sorry I don't want to be bleak I thought I might be distracting to talk, but when I opened my mouth, all that came out.

 “I don't mind,” Campbell said.

“One dark thing brings the rest of the darkness with it.”

 

The rest of the darkness in this story is buried in a vibe that contrasts some of the gothic beauty. The bottom line is Moth for the Star is a darkly beautiful book. It is a vibe and experience you should have if you like elevated dark fantasy and horror. The ending will surprise some but the source of the darkness is so very close to Campbell and Varmas that the tragedy drips off every page.

 

 

 

Book Review: Flux by Ron Goulart

 

Flux By Ron Goulart

159 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published June, 1974 by DAW

 

On a Thursday in 1948 When he was fifteen years old Ron Goulart stepped into a house on Dana Street in Berkeley to take the $1 class on how to write Science Fiction. He is not as famous as his fellow students Marion Zimmer Bradley, Philip K. Dick, or even his teacher and host Anthony Boucher. That said Goulart was no slouch, publishing many SF novels. While just a few years younger he sold his first story one year after PKD in 1952, and they were a part of Boucher’s secret pipeline that went from the living room of his house straight to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

 

When Goulart died in 2022 he was known as a pop culture historian and Science Fiction author. He got on my radar because of something he did in 1965, he asked Phil Dick for advice on writing a novel. He wanted to get together for coffee but thanks to some healthy paranoia Phil asked that he could write a letter instead, as his phone was tapped and his car would only go to his therapist's office according to Goulart's account.  The 5-page letter not addressed to any person is an outline of Philip K. Dick’s formula, and it is a controversial thing as PKD’s friends and colleagues have more than once referred to it as Bullshit, or rejected the notion that Phil followed a formula, all this despite the letter being cited in Sutin’s Divine Invasions bio of PKD.

 

So yeah, Goulart is important to me because the Formula is the basis of a chapter of my book Unfinished PKD, I developed a lecture on it and even wrote my novel using the formula. The fact was that I had not yet read any Ron Goulart, and I knew I would have to fix that. Flux caught my attention, but had I known it was the third in a series I probably wouldn’t have started here. 

 

Flux is a novel that fits my interests, so I am glad to have started here.  If this novel is indicative of his greater style I don’t know, I certainly think it is hard to judge an author by a single work. Flux is a piece of great comedy, and reminds me of the style of Douglas Adams, Rudy Rucker or Robert Sheckley who always had a very tongue-in-cheek style of writing the fantastic.

 

The story of Ben Jolson, a shapeshifter, is an essential skill to have when you are a far-future spy. This is the third book of the Chameleon Corps novels, and I sorta figured out in the first couple of chapters that there was more story than I realized. A spy who can pretend to be another person or object sets up a hyper-SF version of Mission Impossible.

 

Jolson is sent to this colony world Jasper after a series of protests turns violent in the most curious way. In the book, it is referred to as the Suicide Kid problem. Goulart who was a student in college during the 50s was commenting through science fiction on the radical student movements. After finishing the novel, I got the impression that Goulart sympathized with the progressive agenda but was laughing at the movement. Good-natured mostly, but it does start with a movement of students who are so against repression that they have turned to suicide bombing.

 

All inspired by the radical protest poet who is part Abbie Hoffman and part Jim Morrison. 

 

“His name is Bugs Mainey, heard of him on Barnum?”

“Poet, isn’t he?” Jolson bent closer and studied the miniature man.

“Political poet, yes,” said Wheeler-Woolsey. “I’ll sleepbrief you on him and his works. He’s very prolific and fond of self-quotes.”

 

Before I get into Bugs, I loved the little world-building with the sleepbrief method of transmitting information. I wonder how many times after a meeting someone would say “Well that could have been a sleepbrief.”  Bugs is a character built for comedy, a lack of self-awareness, and driving the protest movement with his poems and songs. Jolson having to pretend to be him sets up some funny moments but I felt some moments were left on the table.

 

The world-building in the novel is funny throughout, Goulart sets up gags and pays them off, and the tone reminds me of Dr. Strangelove, this is at a level of just almost over the line into spoof or parody. As serious as some of the messaging is, the jokes never stop he might have been following the AE Van Vogt idea of a new idea every 800 words, but a joke and an SF idea at the same time. For that reason, this book was hilarious, and early on I was wondering why this was not a classic. 

 

There were also weird moments like this scene where the colonists were regularly having robots be the victim of simulated racism. Why and what point Goulart was making with this I wasn’t sure.

 

“Don’t get upset Jolson. They’re all androids,” said the PEO man. “See you won’t see any real blacks in this part of Jasper. Those are just androids out there, for fun.”

A ten-year-old black boy android fell over in the snow, synthetic blood flowing from his nose. I bet the night show is even more fun.”

 

Fun? I think Goulart was trying to make a point about outrage culture, as the youth movements are looking for something to be constantly outraged about. Maybe I was a bit confused and uncomfortable with this chapter. It was a stark contrast to the humor of the rest of the book.  Goulart is keeping up with the satirical nature, but this chapter was not funny, just uncomfortable.

 

Most of the book is straight-up humor and much of it is built on the back of Science fictional concepts one of my favorites was A Jack the Ripper Cosplayer complaining that he could catch any victims or this scene…

 

“R.S.,” said Rosenfield to Jolson, stands for remote sex. Am I getting this straight, J.Jack?”

“Yes.”

“The whole thing is a branch of cybernetics and advocates of remote sex and telemetric intercourse- that's what T.I. stands for, isn’t it J. Jack?”

“Yes, yes.”

“The main idea is,” Continued Rosenfield, “Is you and your wife-by the way Tunky, we still believe in sex only among married people here in Town center #1 – you and your wife can take advantage of the latest gadgets and not have direct contact at all.”

 

Probably my favorite scene was when he has a character Leftover trying to explain the various youth movements, in a scene that explains the generational divide in a hilariously concrete way.

 

“Skinny’s the co-chair of the Killmom movement,” explained Leftover.

“It’s Killgranny,” corrected the pale boy. He dangled and shook the cord and the harmonica fragment fell free.”

“I can’t keep up. Things have changed a lot since my patricidal days.”

“They used to call themselves Killmom,” said mother Bluebird, “then a schism developed. Skinny opted to go along with the portion of dedicated kids who wat to strangle only very old ladies and thereby get them out of the way of progress, Killmom is still staunching dedicated to knocking off any broad over forty. All of them were inspired by your pioneering work in Killpop, Lefty.”

 

Goulart also makes use of repeating gags throughout the novel including Bugs poem titles that seemed a purposeful dig at Bob Dylan.

 

“The man who recorded ‘Head on the Chopping Block and One Foot in the Grave Talking Blues.”

 

Flux is a very funny SF novel, that is filled with radical ideas and some next-level humor. It is dated and I wondered if some of it felt like an old guy talking about a younger generation that was out of touch at the time. Hard for me to say. Some of the humor is not PC by modern SF standards including jokes that made me laugh despite knowledge that the shit wouldn’t fly today. 

 

As an example of Goulart, it seems like a good place to start. The book starts stronger and for the first 2/3 I thought I was reading a forgotten classic. Then the final act sputters out a bit, it doesn’t seem to end with a structure it started with. IT sort of just ends, I didn’t feel the mission on Jasper was solved at all. Over all I enjoyed it. The good in the first part out-weighed the rough parts.

Book Review + Interview: Feral Detective by Jonathan Letham

 

 

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Letham

329 pages, Hardcover

Published November, 2018 by Ecco

I  It might be hard for me to write this review independently of the fact that I interviewed Jonathan at the Philip K. Dick Festival 2024, and since he is part of the small and passionate tribe of massive Dickheads, we hung out for a good part of the weekend.  

That said it is no secret that Jonathan Letham is not only a bestselling author but critically acclaimed so it is not a shocker that I enjoyed my reading experienceknew I wanted to get something signed and picked this title randomly from his catalog of books, mostly for the southern California setting. My first experience with JL was also a noir and soon I will have to check out his science fiction and surrealist work. It is a good thing I read this too, because I didn’t ask a single question about this book in the interview that you can listen to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96-OAR-kNoY&t=3262s

The set-up of The Feral Detective properly tricked me into thinking it was just another noir detective story that moved geographically out to Chandler’s LA into the desert. Sure, all the genre tropes are serviced during the unfolding mystery, but Letham is doing a literary sleight of hand. If you want that preserved then know I think this is a five-star novel and come back after you finish and see if we agree.

“Then again, the story does involve a missing person, and it could well be me. Or you, or practically anybody. As he said to me once, who's not missing?”

Phoebe, a NYC liberal who is still stinging from the 2016 election of Trump finds herself helping to locate her neighbor’s daughter (who she had a close bond with) Arabella. She went missing in the desert in California after taking the train from college at Reed in Portland. The first act sets up the mystery, you’ll be forgiven for thinking this is the reason for the book. Arabella in her absence is actually better defined than some books pull off with their leads.

 “Arabella the young missing lady. “She trusted me. Soon I enjoyed two uncanny familial friendships, upstairs and downstairs in the same duplex. This was a kid who became vegetarian at twelve, after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, and who had three posters in her room: Sleater-Kinney, Pussy Riot, and Leonard Cohen. Her sexuality was unclear, but I got the feeling the sexuality of the entire high school at St. Ann’s was unclear, so she had company.”

All these details might feel like flavor but it is important to the theme of culture clash that is at the heart of the novel.  Certain scenes like an exchange that Phoebe and Arbella have about the nature of mansplaining, and various other genres of Splaining might seem like a humorous exchange just for laughs. This detective tale has a mystery but the heart is about the culture wars.

 The day after Trump won in the liberal world there was a shock and terror that settled in. I remember telling a coworker there was no silver lining. The division that Trump created was just starting but it is clear that Letham was expressing a point, and now as we have to endure him for a third election cycle Letham sure nailed it.

 I watched him do this over the weekend with his keynote speech at the Philip K. Dick fest. He was tweaking his talk throughout the weekend, and when it came time to give his talk it was close to forty minutes of French philosophy, and little history of Science Fiction and then in the end he was telling the audience why reading Philip K. Dick helped them decode oppression. I didn’t see it coming and I certainly didn’t see the point of this novel until the third act.

The Feral Detective opens as noir, it functions as a mystery but it is an excuse to put Phoebe in the desert where the novel explores the conflict between two local off-the-grid tribes - Bears and Rabbits. The hyper-partisan tribalism is the secret agenda of the novel.

Jonathan Letham channeled his questions, anger, and frustration into a novel. I am used to seeing Science Fiction, or horror novelists do this trick. Using the noir novel as a political allegory is pretty impressive. The set-up feels grounded and real and some might find how surreal the final act gets jarring, but that is on purpose. It is a part of the journey of the novel.

The Feral Detective is sneaky great. More Letham reviews are on the way for sure. I am pretty annoyed with myself for not reading more of his work earlier.