Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin Intercourse (1987)
Intercourse is the tract wherein Andrea Dworkin famously stated that all men are rapists and that heterosexual sex is rape, just like the joyless dungaree wearing dyke she was. However, bothering to read the book reveals that she never said anything of the sort, and that her argument as set forth herein is not actually unreasonable. That being said, it's no walk in the park either. Dworkin is not an easy read. She's absolutely uncompromising and unwilling to soft soap, prettify or simplify her argument. The reader is expected to shut the fuck up, pay attention, and no fidgeting if they know what's good for them; and actually, it is good for them, certainly potentially educational.

Essentially it's nothing less than the history of sexual politics mapped out in our changing, evolving attitudes, at least for the last five-hundred or so years, as revealed in the fiction of Tolstoy, Lawrence, Hemingway and others. Dworkin pulls apart established models of human intercourse, social and sexual, with surprising deference reflecting her genuine appreciation of at least a few of these authors, but she pulls no punches and is very good at revealing that which has been staring us in the face all along and which suggests we, as the testicular half of a species, might like to think about growing the fuck up.

To be specific, Dworkin doesn't say anything as blunt or stupid as all sex between men and women is rape, but rather that it can't be anything but rape within the context of the patriarchal structures which inform society; and she's unfortunately right. The revelation is just how much is tied in with those structures, in which respect she's also very thorough, extending her analysis to the extremes of the Nazi death camps and how even there we find echoes of the man sticking his thingie in because he believes it to be his due. It's a solid argument, but one of such composition that there's not much point trying to break it down. Intercourse is, by some definition, an academic narrative, but the dialogue by which it sets forth its argument seems partially intuitive and therefore possibly of such complexity as to defeat being broken down into anything bite-sized.

Intercourse is intense but incredibly rewarding, and if you haven't read it, there seems a reasonable chance that it probably isn't what you think it is. If you're not already on board, it may be time to get over whatever has been holding you back and listen to what the woman had to say.

Also - for what it may be worth - I found Dworkin's filleting of Bram Stoker's thoroughly mediocre Dracula highly satisfying because I was beginning to think it was just me.

Lord of the Flies

William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
I was approaching the point at which it had begun to feel almost embarrassing to admit I'd never read Lord of the Flies. I recall my mother owning a copy with a severed pig's head on the cover but it wasn't among those few titles half-heartedly shunted in our direction at school, and I never saw the movie either; so it seemed like time.

As I'm sure you all know, it's about a bunch of kids getting marooned on an island and acting like wankers - which I believe was actually Golding's original title. Published in 1954 and without bothering to check, it strikes me as likely that it may have been inspired by the populist politics which brought about the second world war, and more specifically how so many people fell hook, line and sinker for all that rabble-rousing tribal bullshit. Lord of the Flies also therefore works fairly well as a commentary upon our own times, and so much so that I'm surprised no point-missing edgelord twat has yet claimed it for a warning against the perils of socialism, as has happened with Orwell's 1984 on a couple of bewildering occasions. It does approximately the same thing as Conrad's Heart of Darkness - positing that we are all capable of acting like wankers - and has the sort of unambiguously direct impact which justifies its reputation as a classic.

All the same, I really didn't enjoy it like I thought I would. Golding's prose is mostly tight and functional with an occasional flourish of admittedly dark poetry, but unfortunately spattered with slightly clumsy passages which cause the narrative to stumble somewhat, such as when Ralph allows the swollen flap of his cheek to close his eye again at the beginning of chapter eleven. He's been in a fight, so I assume he's been punched in the face - although it isn't specifically mentioned so far as I can see - but a flap?

Simon was speaking almost in his ear. Ralph, found that he had rock painfully gripped in both hands, found his body arched, the muscles of his neck stiff, his mouth strained open.

'You'll get back to where you came from.'

Simon nodded as he spoke. He was kneeling on one knee, looking down from a higher rock, which he held with both hands; his other leg stretched down to Ralph's level.

'It's so big, I mean—'

Simon nodded.

What's so big? I can't even tell who has spoken, and although this particular game of Twister is occurring as the lads circumnavigate a cliff face, the activity is implied rather than stated; so from time to time the novel does that thing of omitting some vital piece of information from a sentence, disorientating readers by obliging us to figure it out; so it's a little like reading A.E. van Vogt in places, except Alfred Elton did it on purpose for the sake of atmosphere.

So it's good, and the reputation is probably deserved, but I thought it would be better somehow.

The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion (2019)
Some time has passed since the first two instalments of the story, so I hope to God there'll be more to follow - as I seem to recall being the promise - and that this isn't the end of the saga, called back into publication by the popularity of its own television adaptation; and I hope to God specifically because it's wonderful, and also because it ends on a truly peculiar note which only raises further questions.

The first series of the television adaptation was sort of decent - albeit as a haphazard mash up of the first two books leaving the second series without much to do, hence the application of creative license, but the creative license of corporate telly imagineers which left the thing looking a bit of a dog's dinner and another one for the Tim Burton skip of mannered eccentricity. Picking up this volume and reminding oneself of what the source material does really brings home what a poor second the television adaptation was, even during its better moments. Its true - as has been said - that Gerard Way tends to expect his audience to pay attention, so we don't get anything spelled out and the reader is required to either remember who everyone is, or at least skip back to remind themselves every once in a while; but the effort we put in is rewarded. As with - off the top of my head - Pat Mills' Marshall Law, this isn't quite a superhero book in the traditional sense because the caped types are mostly extras, part of the landscape more than anything - something weird half-seen around a corner rather than pinned out in the glare of yet another headachey origin story; and it works because, aside from anything, the artwork is fucking gorgeous - sort of like Jack Kirby if he'd been born in France or summink.

Hotel Oblivion is grade one Surrealism in the truest sense - as distinct from what usually passes for the same these days - and feels very much like a graphic equivalent to Cocteau's Orphée and its type what with half of its narrative spent somewhere which feels very much like a modern take on some underworld from classical mythology; and it has themes, mostly pertaining to abandonment, shitty parenting and so on. There's a lot to get your teeth into if you're prepared to put in the work. I just hope this isn't the end of it.

Junk Mail

Will Self Junk Mail (2006)
I'm still not quite able to process some of the opprobrium levelled at this guy, much of which seemingly amounts to he ain't one of us, he's from a posh school and he uses all those big words to look clever but he ain't. The most coherent version of this argument, at least that I've found, seems to be something about how we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as a dangerous anti-establishment figure when actually he writes for the Observer and once consumed heroin on the Prime Minister's jet; ergo what mugs we are! I suppose it's an argument of sorts, although it prompts the question of just who you do regard as a dangerous anti-establishment figure - Alan Moore? Stewart Home? Doctor Who? Some guy in a fucking band? Do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? One might just as well argue that we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as Batman's nemesis and the scourge of Gotham City for all the sense it makes.

Failure to creep into the Houses of Parliament clutching a large sphere of black metal with a fuse and BOMB printed on the side notwithstanding, Self's writing, even with all of those long, difficult to understand words, is rarely less than astonishing, illuminating whatever subject he's chosen to pick apart with such high definition focus of intent and meaning as to make the journalistic norm appear somewhat impressionist; which is what makes him such a delight to read, almost regardless of subject. It's rare to come across arguments so well defined. Junk Mail assembles journalistic pieces from newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and even British Airways' slightly ludicrous High Life freebie, but the themes benefit from a similar focus to that which informs Self's fiction, or at least his satire given that it doesn't seem entirely fair to call it fiction considering the escapist connotations of the term. The only major difference is that the writing in Junk Mail is less one layer of allegory compared to My Idea of Fun, How the Dead Live and so on, and here we actually get to meet Traci Emin, Morrissey, Andrea Dworkin and others in person, and get to understand them a little better than we might have done otherwise. He even somehow manages to make Liam Gallagher and Damien Hirst seem marginally less twatty.

Anyway, while it's debatable whether or not Self cuts a dangerous anti-establishment figure - pretending for the sake of argument that it's even a meaningful term - he nevertheless succeeds in seeing through the bullshit of modern existence, and communicating what he's seen in a form which reaches a wide audience, even if it's maybe not quite so wide an audience as dangerous anti-establishment rebel leader Luke Skywalker in all those Star Wars samizdat movies. Even if you have to look up a few long-haired words here and there, Self's writing will always reward anyone making the effort, and for something vaguely amounting to cuttings swept up from the studio floor, this may even be one of his best. Additionally there's the bewildering accusation of arrogance, presumably once again founded on the use of words we might have to look up in a dictionary; and it's bewildering because Junk Mail is nothing if not self-effacing - literally, come to think of it - and the fact of the man's writing having personality is never allowed to obscure whatever he's writing about. Even where dark and harrowing, the clarity of this man's testimony is, as always, a joy to read.

3 in 1

 

Leo Margulies (editor) 3 in 1 (1963)
The idea was to collect novella length stories from the digests which weren't long enough to reprint as novels in their own right, and yet which weren't sufficiently breezy as to justify inclusion in a short story anthology. I'm not sure what the highest available page count would have been for a paperback produced in the early sixties, but I'm guessing not much more than a couple of hundred, hence this volume. I'm also guessing the potential page count may have risen somewhat soon after this was published, which is why we haven't seen a load of these things all washed up in second hand book stores.

Anyway, this one seemed like an essential purchase given the presence of both Simak and Leinster. Theodore Sturgeon's There is No Defense sags a bit towards the end, although is worth reading just for the first half which pretty much beats James S.A. Corey to everything which made The Expanse interesting - at least on the box - but did it all back in 1948. Simak's Galactic Chest is characteristically wonderful, and is actually hard to read without one's inner film director giving the lead role to James Stewart. Finally, there's Murray Leinster's West Wind which isn't one of his best, but is nevertheless worth reading at least once because it's Leinster and as such goes everywhere but the places you might expect it to go. Truthfully, the only points deducted are for how much it reminds me of one of Algis Budrys' slightly twitchy cold war fables, and there are probably worse things to be reminded of.

The Spider's Web

 

Philip Purser-Hallard The Spider's Web (2020)
I'm really beginning to suspect that Holmes may simply not be my thing. Actually, if I'm honest with myself, I know full well that he never really was, but it seemed worth making the effort here because it's Philip Purser-Hallard who seems more or less incapable of dull or otherwise merely workmanlike prose. Here, he introduces Holmes and Watson to an adjacent fictional landscape inhabited by persons from The Importance of Being Earnest and others, placing me at an additional disadvantage through my being more or less completely ignorant regarding the work of Oscar Wilde.

So I'm not absolutely comfortable with the form - page after page of exposition following the process of deduction, concerning which, objections would probably seem churlish given that The Spider's Web is detective fiction, and I went into this with both eyes open; and I experienced occasional difficulties keeping track of all the various deductive threads and the persons to whom they were referring, which probably wouldn't have happened were I more familiar with Wilde's people.

Nevertheless, it still just about worked for me, being beautifully written, as ever, and while I'm obviously in no position to weigh in on how well Purser-Hallard has captured the voices of Ernest, Algernon and the rest, I sort of suspect that he has because they're a delight to read, and his portrayal of Lady Bracknell is magnificent, uproarious, duly terrifying, and has convinced me that I really need to familiarise myself with Earnest as soon as possible. Even when writing at some distance outside one's comfort zone, Philip Purser-Hallard's work is always a pleasure to read.

Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds

 

Gerard Way & others Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds (2020)
Weight of the Worlds turned out to be the grand finale and I believe the Young Animal imprint ceased to be soon after - which seems a telling indictment given that, despite poor sales killing off the comic book, there's an expensive looking TV adaptation which has lasted two series at the time of writing. I haven't seen it because it resembles a million other grunting caped shows if the trailer is any indication.

Way's version of the Doom Patrol was quite heavily populated by this point, so there was a lot going on and most of it thoroughly peculiar; but it never becomes a problem, unless you're unable to read without having every last secret origin spelled out for you. The story, based on what sense I could make of it, tells of the gang's adventures in both outer space and within the internal reality of Danny the Ambulance. It's mostly completely illogical and makes a point of tripping itself up every few pages, apparently for the sake of keeping readers on their toes, but it works beautifully if you just hang on and make an effort to enjoy the ride without worrying too much about the sort of shit that comic book twats habitually worry about. For what it may be worth, I particularly enjoyed Flex Mentallo's battle with a pair of sentient alien swimming trunks - so that's one to look out for.

The art is absolutely gorgeous even with a different artist for each original issue, which otherwise doesn't always work but makes perfect sense here given the narrative shifts from one episode to the next. Also worth noting is that with Weight of the Worlds, Way's Doom Patrol no longer felt quite so much like an homage to Grant Morrison and had really become its own thing, which you apparently didn't bother to buy so now it's dead. Nice going, fuckers.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 752

 

C.C. Finlay (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 752 (2020)
The Fantasy & Science Fiction Twitter account has taken to bestowing hearts upon the links I've posted to my reviews of previous issues, which is nice, but has additionally fostered a certain sense of dread regarding this issue, the current one. I picked it up because I saw Matthew Hughes' name on the cover, then immediately realised that I would now feel obliged to say nice things about the magazine, which would be awkward if it turned out to be awful.

Thankfully it isn't. There were a couple of stories which weren't to my liking to greater or lesser degrees, but the general standard is exceptionally high, and enough so for the quality of the good stuff to fully eclipse that of material which wasn't to my taste. For the sake of balance, I'll get my objections out of the way first.

How to Burn Down the Hinterlands by Lyndsie Manusos is probably the only contribution I didn't really enjoy on any level. It has dramatic potential, although I found the author's claim of there being a lot of nods to fantasy worlds, tropes and video games that I love in it massively off-putting, particularly once we encounter entire paragraphs of faux-dramatic non-sentences impersonating a portentous voice-over of the kind usually describing the sort of exhausting CGI overload you get in superhero movies wherein Fatso the Human Flying Saucer breaks open the eternity stone and becomes as one with the reality interface of an entire universe; and usually describing this because Hinterlands seems to do just two things - that being one, the other being the scene where the music swells and we zoom in upon a craggy frown vowing to do this not just for its children, but also for its children's children, so mote it be.

Everything paused, stood still. My vision was speckled with glinting metal, shards and liquid drops of shine. The sword's essence waited there. It was not a person. It was an intangible thing, indescribable. Waiting for me.

You see, waiting for me doesn't really work as a sentence in isolation. They're just three words staring forlornly at the space just ahead where the comma should have been. Then there are plenty of other similarly inert constructions effecting to resemble portentous expectorations which work better as titles than as sentences. It's as though someone has devised a written equivalent of the art of Jim Lee - an endless swirl of ninja daggers, cinematic bodies in billowing togas, and grimacing faces with far too much cross-hatching.

I had fewer problems with Nick DiChario's beautifully written La Regina Ratto, but something nevertheless didn't sit right with me and this urban fable. Possibly it's that our main character shagging a human-sized female rodent sails a little too close to furry territory for my liking, although the parallel seems most likely unintentional

Then somewhat on the cusp we have Sarina Dorie's A Civilised and Orderly Zombie Apocalypse per School Regulations. Dorie is introduced as author of something called Womby's School for Wayward Witches - a series, naturally - which seemed ominous; and this story begins as an apparent response to the question, what if we combined Harry Potter with zombies? As a proposal, it was never going to score bigly in this house, and makes me think of Who fanfic types who list Douglas Adams as their greatest inspiration; and then about halfway through, we come to this:

In the news, they had reported that a newly developed serum could arrest the side effects of becoming infected. I just had to keep these students safe long enough for the police and paramedics to arrive and deliver the antidote.

Right. Thanks for that. My expectations weren't great, but this reads like the sort of heavy handed improvised exposition one finds in stories written by persons still in school, and while Dorie is herself a school teacher, I'm thinking ninth grade here.

Yet, despite such objections, a trace of Joyce Grenfell politely failing to keep her class from anarchy creeps in towards the end, perhaps revealing that for which Dorie had been gunning all along, and the last few pages deliver a very satisfying if admittedly gruesome conclusion. Consider me impressed.

Elsewhere, I have Gregor Hartmann's, On Vapour, Which the Night Condenses down as generally decent; and Nadia Afifi's The Bahrain Underground Bazaar and Cylin Busby's The Homestake Project are both powerfully evocative, although you can somehow tell that Busby also writes children's books.

Theodore McCombs' The Silent Partner is wonderful and reminds me a little of Ray Bradbury. A Tale of Two Witches by Albert E. Cowdrey is exceptionally good, with horror employed as an aspect of the story rather than the whole point, which I really appreciate. It's the third I've read by Cowdrey and I'm yet to be disappointed.

Amman Sabet's, Skipping Stones in the Dark is likewise wonderful. My only criticism would be that through being narrated by an artificial intelligence which observes from a distance, much of what occurs reads like a synopsis, albeit a synopsis for something I would quite happily read if expanded to novella or even novel length with all of the details filled in.

Coming at last to the main attraction, at least for me, Matthew Hughes, The Glooms, is worth the admission price alone. This is the second of his short stories that I've read, and the second to inspire me to the realisation that I really need to buy his books, which is unusual because it isn't ordinarily the sort of thing which would appeal to me - a pseudo mediaeval world of wizards and castles. Hughes writes fantasy like no-one else I've read, with a wit which really draws the reader in; and with genuinely unexpected narrative twists and turns making for a story which defies expectations; and without resorting to the clichés which often make the genre such a chore; and all occupying a plausible magical reality which feels very much as though it works as well under its own steam even after we've finished reading. Oddly, Hughes writing with the texture of daily experience combined with the clarity of what he writes - no easy magical solutions here - reminds me of Stephen Baxter albeit in a very different genre and without Baxter's occasionally overpowering pessimism.

So thankfully, it hasn't been at all difficult finding nice things to say about this issue, given that pleasing most of the people most of the time is nothing to be sniffed at; and additional praise is due for Jerry Oltion's brain-strangling essay, Is Math Real? and the poetry of Beth Cato and Mary Soon Lee, which I say as someone who very rarely connects with poetry.

Dwellers in the Mirage

 

Abraham Merritt Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
This is my third Merritt, and possibly my last depending upon how charitable I'm feeling should I happen across any of the remaining five in a used book store. While there's much to recommend Abe, of those I've read, this is the third of his novels to feature what is more or less the same story which, in case you can't be arsed to skip back to September, I've already summarised thus:

...belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra.

 

As with both The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss, Dwellers in the Mirage gets off to a frankly astonishing start before settling into a hundred or so pages of people running around with swords, and people who seem to have crept into the book while you weren't looking so it's anyone's guess who the hell they're supposed to be.

Merritt writes beautifully, like a grown man version of that to which Lovecraft aspired but never really quite achieved. His characters are fascinating and the set ups and situations into which they stumble are genuinely bizarre, and additionally spiced by the author pulling off some fairly detailed and hence plausible scientific explanations for the weirder aspects of his tale. Here we have a man who finds himself sharing a body with the personality of some mythic warrior from antiquity, and who then discovers a lost civilisation of pygmies living beneath a remote lake, except what appears to be a lake is actually some peculiar atmospheric effect concealing a Carboniferous landscape. The first half reads a little like Asimov turning his hand to sword and what may resemble sorcery but is actually a perfectly logical scientific phenomenon.

And I reflected, now, that science and religion are really blood brothers, which is largely why they hate each other so, that scientists and religionists are quite alike in their dogmatism, their intolerance, and that every bitter battle of religion over some interpretation of creed or cult has its parallel in battles of science over a bone or rock.

Unfortunately, the second half seems to be grunting fights, and I lost track of who was fighting who or how it started. In fact our man seems to have switched sides at some point, and I still have no idea why, or who Dara was supposed to be, so it became quickly exhausting. This is a shame because Merritt's Khalk'ru is essentially Lovecraft's Cthulhu written by a man with a solid understanding of physics and who isn't crippled by a pathological fear of foreigners.

Bugger. There's so much that's good about this one that maybe I should give him another chance. I guess we'll have to see.