Book Review: Good Men Do Nothing by John Brunner

 

 

Good Men Do Nothing by John Brunner

 204 pages, Paperback
Published May, 1971 by Pyramid

This is the second part in a trilogy?  I didn’t find out this fact until after I finished reading and that explains many of the shortcomings I felt. Not sure it is fair to rate or review this book as most of my issues were the lack of set-up and how we seemed to jump into the middle of a story. 

John Brunner is one of my favorite SF authors so the weird oddity of a popular genre author (who is a very white dude) writing a black James Bond was strange to me.  As good as John Brunner’s finest work is, he has written plenty of quickie books for money and less quality.  So what is this book?  Outside of the curiosity factor, there is little reason a modern reader would be interested. As a John Brunner fan and eventual completionist (I am not even close to reading all his stuff) I had to read this. John Brunner is one of the best authors who like Philip K. Dick started publishing in the tail end of the Golden Age and ended up benefitting from the weird direction of the New Wave. 

His novel Stand on Zanzibar is to me the best SF novel of the 20th century, he has several bonafide masterpieces including The Jagged Orbit(I have not read it yet, but I have read about it) that deals with racism. As good as a proper liberal leaning in radical ideals could be on race issues in 1970 John Brunner probably had good intentions when he decided to write a black James Bond.

I wonder who thought of this? Max Curfew is an interesting character, had he been written by a black author might have seen a little better of a story/reaction. In recent years there has been a push for Idris Elba to be Bond. The problem of course is his age. Maybe John Boyega would be better.  

Regardless, this book is hard or nearly impossible to judge on its own, so I am going to at least find book one before I judge it.

 

Book Review: Forgotten Sisters by Cynthia Pelayo

 

Forgotten Sisters by Cynthia Pelayo

 303 pages, Paperback
Published March, 2024 by Thomas & Mercer

Around the time that Del Toro’s amazing Pan’s Labyrinth was being discovered as a part of the Oscar season, there was a rush or a push to find Horror novels that connected to fairy tales. I remember agents in their manuscript wish lists asked for dark fairy tales constantly. Certainly, there are plenty of those novels if that is your thing from directly related takes like Sarah Pinborough’s Tales from the Kingdom Trilogy or modern retellings like Victor LaValle’s The Changeling. The former is a book that I would compare to Pelayo’s dark fairy tale and vivid Chicago gothic. These books are natural cousins.

 I grew up one state over from Chicago but had family and friends in the city and spent much time there, so I enjoyed the setting. Chicago is a character in this book make no mistake, and as such you get both a gritty ground-level description of the city while learning some history about the city.  The novel is connected to one of the city’s most tragic events the shipwreck of the SS Eastland.

Anna and Jennie live in an older house along the Chicago River, it is one of those old creaky houses that echo the past. “A house is alive, as we are alive. In many ways a house is always recording, and when ready it will recount to us images and sounds, maybe more of the secrets it holds. A house always watches, waits, and listens for its caretaker, but it also recognizes when a new tide is coming, and it will warn us.”

The relationship between the two sisters is deep but know that (without spoiling) it is complicated. This is a feature, not a bug. Anna is your main POV, although ever few chapters we get the point of view of the detectives working a murder case. This is an interesting choice in a first-person narrative.

The mystery involves a series of bodies being found in or around the Chicago River. The victims are in various forms of decay. Anna had a unique way of seeing the city, obsessed with the dark history and corners of a city that was once centered around the industry of slaughter. 

Much of what makes Anna a compelling character is confirmed in the final acts, so if you want to know my non-spoiler thoughts. I think this is a great novel for fans of Chicago. Urban horror, modern fairy tales, and character. This is a very good novel, that didn’t fully win me over until the final act when parts I was unsure about ended up paying off nicely.

I want to be careful of hyperbolic over-the-top reviews because I very much enjoyed this novel, but it is not perfect. I was a bit confused by the choice of first-person when the POV shifts so often. That might be a writer problem, I don’t think many readers worry about who or why the story is being told that way. I was engaged enough with the story I forgot all that stuff. I understood the choice in the final and thought the pay off was worth it.

So, if you have read it and want my thoughts… here-be spoilers as the reason I dug it is mostly in the details of execution. I am serious about SPOILERS…

The best elements of this novel certainly involve spoilers, and yes there were moments where I thought this book lost me. There were 10 or 15 pages when I was confused about what exactly was happening. There is a confusing POV shift in the final act when Anna’s sanity and grip on reality is tested. The good news is I stuck it out. The setup and pay-off worked for this reader. 

What makes Forgotten Sisters special is the blending of modern and historical. CP works with a foundation for this ghost story on two tracks. The Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid on one track and on the other the historical Tragedy of the SS Eastland, a ship that crashed in the Chicago River killing 800 people. A ghost story inspired by two sisters who died on the ship, this novel is about a haunting, but the ending works because the twist that Anna’s sanity and break from reality was in front of us the whole time. The tragic thing is Anna lost her sister, and the reason she was afraid the leave the house, the reason her sister did want her to leave is the haunting couldn’t follow her.

“Can't you finally understand? Can't you finally see that it's that city will not let you leave? You are the steel in the skyscrapers. You are the cobblestones hidden beneath the asphalt-covered streets you are the Chicago River.”

The fairy tale, gothic and crime elements are the building blocks but the final act is when the novel becomes a modern horror novel. The twist is heartbreaking the nightmare of the faces in the water, the bodies in the river…truth is Anna is alone. Great reveal.

“I want to tell her about my nightmare last night and the waking terror I experienced. I suppose they were both nightmares, seeing those faces in the river and the siren in my room, who seemed so real.”

Cena Pelayo is an author now officially on my radar. Forgotten Sisters is a wonderfully structured genre-blending novel. Big thumbs up.

 

Audiobook Review: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

 

 

 

10 hours, Audible Audio

Published July , 2024 by Macmillan Audio

 

 André Santana (Narrator), Charlie Jane Anders (Narrator), CJ Leede (Narrator), Georgia Bird (Narrator), Liz Kerin (Narrator), Mara Wilson (Narrator), Mark Oshiro (Narrator), Sarah Gailey (Narrator), Stephen Graham Jones (Narrator), T. Kingfisher (Narrator), TJ Klune (Narrator)

 

“They say you know it’s love when someone offers to drive you to LAX, and right now I’m feeling the love.” 

I need to make my normal disclaimer that audio doesn’t get the deep kind of reviews I can normally offer with a prose book that said. I loved this novel, but when I searched for a hardcopy from my library, I would have had months to wait but the Libby app had the audiobook right away. 

I am aware of the Chuck Tingle persona. I respect a man so powerfully committed to the schtick that he wears a pink bag over his head for entire conventions. He got his start selling dinosaur-themed gay erotica, the titles were funny enough that they went viral. I heard they were funny but I never checked them out. Around the time of Tingle’s first serious horror novel, I heard him on a podcast, I think This Is Horror. Now he was on my radar. I had meant to check out his work. It was seeing Tingle on panels at Stokercon that pushed me to commit to it.

I didn’t read anything about the plot, characters, or settings. I knew nothing about the novel except the title. Even talking about the genre is a bit of a spoiler, and it is one I didn’t have. This novel is a masterwork of Set-up and pay-off, parallels and reversals, all the stuff I enjoy. It is satire for an industry that is centered mostly in one city so it is a novel of that city. I loved it, and enjoyed the audiobook presentation so yes before I break down, I really like this one.  

It might be in my top ten at the end of the year, so yeah read it. OK, we are going to get into minor spoilers and I will give a warning again before heavy spoilers.

Bury Your Gays is an LA/Hollywood dark satire told through a science fiction horror lens. The SF aspects were elements that surprised me greatly. It is effective horror and Sci-fi so when I say satire I mean the dark kind. There are plenty of laughs, but some scenes like the Mrs. Why on the plane are effective suspense and terror, and much of the story is moving when it needs to be.

 

Misha is a screenwriter, who has built a career on queer-coded horror movies. He is writing the season finale of his X-files like TV-series and is excited to finally bring two characters out of the closet and together. He has been building for three seasons to get to this point and his producer Jack who now works for the studio tells him he must kill the characters.

“In film, in TV, in books... the queer characters never get a happy ending," I press. "Sometimes they're the first to go, other times they make some brave sacrifice in the finale, but it always ends in tragedy and death. That's why it's called bury your gays.”

This inner dialogue explains why Misha, (who is LA-out, but not hometown-out), is disgusted. The studio orders him to kill the characters, but he refuses and then the battle begins.  The studio threatens to fire him and sue him if he doesn’t do it. He has worked his whole career for HBS, a Tingle verse stand-in for Warner Brothers. He is nominated for an Oscar for a short film he made, but the studio is focused on its nomination for a dead actor they re-created with AI.

Misha starts to wonder if he is losing his mind. The very monsters he created in his screenplays begin to stalk him, his scared reactions to this go viral and his life starts to fall apart.  His very own creations.  This first act of the novel has Wes Craven’s New Nightmare vibes in a really good way.

This is a horror novel that is a Meta-level comment on Storytelling, writing horror, and writing for the industry, and Hollywood in general. It also comments on living in LA. The structure of this narrative is nearly perfect. With interludes to Misha growing up and scenes in screenplay format (those were acted out with the voice talent of other authors.) the structure is a part of it all.   (also major spoilers ahead…I mean it)

“The beats of this particular story are music to my ears, and I'm certainly not complaining, but they're not the beats I'm used to. Then again, not everything has a perfect structure: a beginning, middle, and end. Not every tale has an act-three synthesis and a dark night of the soul.

Sometimes life just is.”

This made me laugh because the structure is nearly perfect. The mystery of the first half works well enough that I wasn’t quite sure which direction it would go and when it did I didn’t see it coming.  The novel is not just themed on Hollywood Greed although it is…

“You know who the real villain is?” I continue, strolling through the lobby and joining a line of other writers, directors, cinematographers, and actors as they filter inside to find their seats. “Unchecked capitalism and the desire for capitalist systems to monetize other people’s trauma.”

But also one of the most debated topics connected to the creative industries, the use of AI, and one of the neatest magic tricks is Tingle took the writer’s current boogeyman, AI, and made it into the monster of the story. Well Nano-bot storms created by AI, the HBS studio uses technology to create living avatars of their intellectual properties. One reason why this is such a smart satire is because the monster is IP itself. Everything is IP in Hollywood baby.

 The novel works out with multiple twists and this story’s version of ‘You Think You Beat the Monster’ is a victory for Gay Hollywood…

“We've got trans-Mothman, we've got a gay goblin, we've got bi Mrs. Why.”

These scenes are funny, and depressing at the same time. Hollywood often learns the wrong lessons. That said Micha learns the right lesson and that is the powerful part of the book. Micha has a very important arc, but what impresses me most is that it comments on important themes that are so well woven into the story. 

Bury Your Gays is a fantastic piece of LBGTQ themes Science fiction and horror, it should appeal to all readers who are fans of the horror genre, Science Fiction fans I am not so sure. The novel is science fiction but it leans more towards horror and satire.  If I could give it more than a perfect five stars I would. Excellent stuff. 

Book Review: Letters to C. L. Moore and Others by H.P. Lovecraft & CL Moore

 

 Letters to C. L. Moore and Others by H.P. Lovecraft & CL Moore

 413 pages, Paperback
Published January, 2017 by Hippocampus Press

A Phil Dickian I am lucky that every part of that writer’s life is very detailed in multiple biographies. Catherine Lucille Moore is the next author of the past I have become most fascinated with. Her life is the opposite, and honestly, before this book was suggested I thought we would never know about her life at all. I hate that I feel I have to introduce her with every review, but he name is not as well known as it should be.

Here is how the publisher introduced the book…

“This latest volume of H. P. Lovecraft’s complete unabridged correspondence is unique in that it contains a substantial amount of letters by one of his most distinctive later colleagues—the weird writer C. L. Moore, whose stories mingling fantasy and sexuality were among the most striking contributions to Weird Tales in the 1930s. Lovecraft’s letters to Moore survive only fragmentarily, but Moore wrote more than 60,000 words of letters to Lovecraft, and these are now published for the first time, revealing a vivid imagination and keen analytical mind who held her own in debates with her older colleague. Lovecraft introduced Moore to her future husband and writing partner, Henry Kuttner, whose own brief correspondence is included here.”

This book is a collection of letters between the two writers between 1934 and 36. There is very little we know about Catherine and her time, in Indianapolis, which is of great interest to me not just because she is from my home state (her college dorm was a five-minute walk from the house I lived in during high school, but also because she is an important figure to the genre, even more so than Lovecraft for me. There are plenty of sources of information about Howie. Personally I like her fiction more.

The existence of these letters is something I knew about, the existence of this book was a revelation. It is a look into the lives of these writers. Moore and Lovecraft most share ideas about the field of weird fiction and that stuff is fascinating. Some of the most fascinating moments are Moore’s reactions to deep reads of the stories that Lovecraft shared with her.  Some were handwritten and Moore appeared to type them up for Lovecraft. Some seriously famous stories like Call of Cthulhu for example appeared to be first typed by her. Many will find Lovecraft’s letter telling Moore of Robert E. Howard’s death and his passionate feelings for the Conan stories most powerful. I did find those parts fascinating. Lovecraft took stories I found impressive already and explain them in a way that made me want to go back and read them again.

Odd that this book is credited to HP Lovecraft and not CL Moore, who wrote a good majority of the words. This was a problem in her life when many of the stories she co-wrote with her husband were often remembered as Kuttner tales. I know most are reading this book for what they can learn about Howie…still.

Last you’ll have to check out my column about Catherine Moore over at Amazing Stories for why I am most interested.  I am trying to get a plaque up in the building she worked in during the 1930s I wanted more details about her work life. There are some fun moments on that front, but I wanted more. She tells Howie about going to movies in Indianapolis and working for pretty much every banker in the Fletcher Trust Building. That is neat. So yeah Lest honor her memory.

Check out how you can help here:

https://amazingstories.com/2024/08/25th-century-five-and-dime-7-help-us-honor-science-fiction-and-horror-pioneer-catherine-lucille-moore/

Yeah. If you are interested in a deep history of weird fiction this is a must-read.