I’m not an expert in this field, so I don’t know how it ranks among books about identity design, but I certainly found it accessible, engaging, and informative.

needs more demons? no.

And in fact, the prose authors delivered several of the high points. My favorite story was McDonald’s “Tonight We Fly” — brief, moving, unexpected, hard to discuss without risking spoilers. Baxter’s Daryl Gregory’s streamlined and action-packed “Message from the Bubblegum Factory” put his debut novel Pandemonium onto my to-read list. I also liked Stephen Baxter’s “Vacuum Lad.” Screenwriter Joseph Mallozzi makes his prose debut with the novella “Downfall,” a story about a reformed villain living undercover. I was gripped by the first three-quarters of it, but thought the dénouement sank into cliché. Chris Roberson’s “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” deftly ties together a number of ’40s pulp elements with a few twists much more original than its heavily-used title.

Many of these stories opt for an approach that seems inspired by Alan Moore’s landmark Watchmen, emphasizing grit and emotional realism, with liberal amounts of violence and pseudo-realistic extrapolation. (One might get the impression that nanomachines are the millennial equivalent of hard radiation doses in Golden Age comics.) I found this a bit wearying en masse and I would have liked to see something in the outré vein of Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol, or some satire of comics’ overblown excesses. (Peter and Kathleen David’s “Head Cases” provided a welcome shift of mood, but although I found its setup promising, I didn’t think it followed through.)

One very positive note: the volume is largely free of in-jokes of the “figure out which trademarked character I’m slyly re-purposing” variety.

needs more demons? needs a smidge more variety

needs more demons? not so much.

But such a thin summary doesn’t do this rich, strange, book justice. Part of what it makes it work is the wealth of specific detail — Addison spent considerable effort researching the medical treatment and rehabilitation of burn victims, among other things, and it shows. The narrator begins the novel as an atheist whose strict empiricism goes somewhat beyond normal skepticism; paradoxically, I found that his disbelief in the sculptress’s stories made them more credible.

The book fits together like a puzzle box, with stories-within-stories and multiple resonances between the present and the (possible) past. Addison generally navigates this complex terrain deftly, but there are mis-steps: it’s obvious enough that the narrator, with his misshapen, ruined face is the gargoyle of the title; having him also sculpted in gargoyle form seems to belabor the point. Addison employs some authorial devices that are jarring by modern standards — the narrator addresses the reader directly and there’s at least one substantial chunk of “I didn’t know this then, but” exposition (in fairness, the narrator is setting pen to paper with previous authorial experience of writing porn movie “scripts” and few scraps of poetry; perhaps any clunkiness is deliberate on Addison’s part). A key chapter of the novel, which incorporates elements of myth and a much older work of literature, fell flat for me.

But despite a handful of flaws the book was engrossing, moving, and ultimately satisfying. It joins The Raw Shark Texts and Alive in Necropolis as the third remarkably strong debut novel I’ve read in the past few months, and I’ll be looking forward to Addison’s next.

needs more demons? Nope, the gargoyle comes with a doozy.

The Nymphos of Rocky Flats is easily the worst book I’ve read in years. The characters are one-dimensional at-best. The plot is too ludicrous to work any way but played-for-laughs — in Christopher Moore’s hands the same plot skeleton could have made for much hilarity — but Acevedo strives for a hard-boiled tone. Unfortunately, his first-person narrator Felix Gomez is both sexist enough for the description of every female character to include breast size, and dull enough to use adjectives like “large” and “small” for said descriptions; Acevedo might be aiming for vampire Chandler, but he doesn’t even achieve vampire Parker. And for a book with “nymphos” in the title? Really not providing much of what we used to call “socially redeeming value.”

Needs More Demons?
I need the hours I spent on this book back.

My friend Tim of the Doubtful Palace has several times compared Aickman to Kelly Link. My first brush with Aickman was disappointing, I think because my expectations were mis-calibrated. I found few specific points of similarity between the two writers: Aickman is implicitly patriarchal where Link is feminist. Link’s work often plays with the nature of the short story itself, incorporating elements of fable, myth, and an oneiric sensibility. Cold Hand in Mine’s stories are written more-or-less in a naturalistic mode with discernible beginnings, middles, and ends. Aickman’s prose evinces an archetypal British restraint; Link’s does not.

On my second time through, though, I think I got what Tim was trying to communicate. Link and Aickman share something more important than any specific stylistic sensibility; they are both strong writers with unique voices who are ill-suited to pigeon-holing. Aickman reminds me in fragmentary aspects of many other writers — his protagonists are often withdrawn and isolated, as are many of Kafka’s. He shares an ability to narrate compellingly from the viewpoint of decidedly unpleasant characters with Jonathan Carroll. At least two of these stories reminded me in some way of Julio Cortázar. But Aickman is really nothing like Kafka, Carroll, or Cortázar. He is perhaps most often described as a writer of “ghost stories,” but none of the tales in this volume are ghost stories per se. The story that comes closest to featuring a conventional supernatural entity doesn’t even use the word that describes it.

The final pair of stories (also the longest two) were my favorites. “Meeting Mr Millar,” is a very unusual take on “things that go bump in the night”; it continually defied my expectations of it. In “The Clock-Watcher” the effect that the clocks exert on Ursula mirrors the impact of her husband’s mistrust and gradual estrangement. Generally I found Aickman’s stories “unsettling’ more than “frightening”; this one was also unexpectedly moving.

Needs More Demons? No.

I spent a little time trying to find affordable copies of other Aickman works (tricky prospect, but I believe I have landed a copy of The Wine Dark Sea) and was amused to note that several vendors are apparently selling this book as Cold Hand in the Mine.