needs more demons? no.

The first thing I noticed was the vividness of the prose. In the service of these stories Beach deploys striking metaphors and similes, crisp and believable dialogue, and rich and evocative adjectives and verbs. It frankly astounds me that this is his first published fiction.

WIthin the first few pages I was also struck by the formidable range of Beach’s stories. They’re all over the map, both literally, and in terms of tone, setting, even genre and theme.

It’s also impressive how complete many of the stories are. Some not only establish character, setting, mood, but also establish a narrative conflict or even suggest its resolution. A few beg for continuation, to be seen as an excerpt from a longer work — and at least a couple of them are explicitly connected — but most of them don’t. They’re self-contained little nuggets. One of them is almost like a distillation of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle into, well, 420 characters.

I’m tempted to include a handful here, but I wouldn’t know where to start or stop. I almost want to retype the whole book, which would clearly exceed the boundary of fair use. And there’s a generous sampling at 420characters.com; if it’s not quite the set I would have curated, I think it’s fairly representative.

Lest I seem too gushy — I do think it’s far easier to make a great string of 420 characters than to make great strings of 420 characters that tie into a cohesive whole the size of a book, or even the size of a more typical short story. Last paragraphs are much harder to write than first paragraphs, and most of these stories are more like beginnings than like endings. Beach hasn’t proven to me that he can sustain the level of creativity he displays here throughout a work that’s judged by more conventional standards, less dependent on elision. But I really, really, want to see him try.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

But jeez, I hated this book. Flat prose, lifeless characters, and a plot that was neither surprising nor internally consistent. Particularly given the allegations some of made about the real-world Dodgson’s association with Liddell, portraying a very young “Alyss” in a friendship with a romantic dimension troubled me (the more so because the plot doesn’t actually require it, since Alyss ages substantially over the course of the novel). And although I know the use of “black” as a poetic metaphor for evil is a longstanding tradition, the novel’s positioning of “White Imagination” as good and “Black Imagination” as bad bugged me a lot, too.
And I suppose it’s not really much more violent or militaristic than Star Wars, but The Looking Glass Wars‘ body count and general blood thirstiness seemed excessive a kids’ story (when this book’s Red Queen screams “off with [his/her] head!” she really means it).

needs more demons? yuck.

p.s., I should let this go, but I can’t.

“Quel est ceci?” asked the magistrate, not amused

Can one of the first-year French students please tell the class how we say “what is this?” in French? Now, let’s not always see the same hands.

“That’s right; think it over,” said Eddie. “It’s a good proposition and that ain’t no dream. He’s not exactly pretty, but he’s there with a bundle of kale that would choke the Panama. He’d set you up in a swell apartment, plaster sparklers all over you, and give you a year-after-next model eight lunger and a shuffer. You’d be the only cheese on Michigan Boulevard.”

needs more demons? a smidge of historical perspective might help, but demons would not.

Bray explicitly references Don Quixote throughout, but the picaresque novel Going Bovine most called to my mind was Candide, or perhaps even more, a slightly updated and mostly de-ribaldized Candy. (Like Candide, Cameron is young and naive.) Cameron bounces rather fecklessly between various groups of people (Mardi Gras revelers, cultists, and reality show producers among them). Bray doesn’t offer the nastiness of truly great satire, but provides trenchant observations throughout. This bit:

It’s one of those places full of useless junk — state spoons, frosted pecans with a half-life of about two hundred years, tea towels decorated with cranky observations about life, novelty cookbooks, and trivets shaped like lighthouses because apparently the world is clamoring for cute things they can place piping hot casserole dishes on. It’s hard to believe people buy this shit, and even harder to believe they give it to other people as mementos, like, “Hey, we went on this awesome vacation but we brought you back some pickled peppers in a festive, dancing jalapeno jar. Thanks for feeding our cat!”

was particularly fun to encounter in a resort town, with friends looking after our felines.

needs more demons I liked this novel quite a bit, but Cameron’s passivity bugged me, the tone was a bit inconsistent, and I’m a bit ambivalent about the ending. But I give it credit for being much more ambitious than typical supernatural YA fare. And you may never look at snow globes the same way.

I wasn’t always a cigarette-smoking bad girl. Not by any means. In seventh grade, I made a fairly conscious decision, as a matter of fact, to try on some juvie shoes over my straight laces. . . I figure someday, maybe during college, or, hell, even after if I’m really feeling it, I’ll just take the juive shoes off, dust off my Mary Janes, and here’s good Lily. Give her an A+ and a job, please.

Finally, the novel is set in Long Island, and the protagonists are fans of New York’s American League baseball team. That’s actually not what bugs me. My issue is that to show support, they will don a “Yankee cap,” singular, which to me sounds like it should be a Confederate flag in a universal “No” circle. Maybe it’s a Long Island quirk?
But these are minor concerns, and I think this book gets an awful lot dead-on right. It doesn’t moralize. The teens aren’t “good kids” or “bad kids,” just kids trying to muddle through the best they can. (Their parents are another story; they are decidedly “bad parents.”) Lily, Noah, and Simon’s voices are distinct, credible, and compelling – Brezenoff doesn’t downplay their flaws to make them more likable. The overlapping narrative structure means that a few of the same events are seen from multiple perspectives, and they’re a little different: the dialogue and action don’t match exactly which I think is quite a nice touch, demonstrating the subjectivity of memory and how we all engineer our own stories a little bit.

needs more demons? on the contrary, completely held my attention despite the total lack of genre plot elements.

In several specific chapters it struck me as not only reminiscent of several Arthur C. Clarke works, but also evocative of older and less cerebral earthlings-struggling-to-comprehend-and-survive-a-strange-environment tales (Farmer’s “World of Tiers” Burroughs homages, in particular). But it’s also firmly in the post-Singularity sub-genre of science fiction, and informed by recent thoughts about space-time geometries, among other things.

On one level it’s the story of Cley, a young woman in the far distant future who may be the last “original” human (or at least the closest to homo sapiens) and her struggles to escape a powerful (but helpfully imprecise) entity bent on her destruction. But it’s also a rumination on how intelligence might differ, on the breadth and voracity of life, and on the value of the human spirit — and humanity itself — in a vast and indifferent-seeming cosmos.

It worked least well for me when Cley is among the “Supra” humans. The Supras intelligence supposedly outstrips ours, their lifespans are measured in centuries, and their physiologies are substantially different — they’ve dispensed, for instance, with external genitalia. But Benford’s portrayal of their society seems almost parochial, with unquestioned assumptions of heterosexual orientation, serial monogamy, and sexual jealousy as a motivating factor. When one of them courts Cley, the dynamic is all-too familiar from Woody Allen movies. (To be fair, Supra society is not Benford’s primary focus: our viewpoint character, Cley, looks in on them as an outsider; maybe some of the assumptions about the rules of that society are Cley’s as much as Benford’s. And I’m glad Benford doesn’t dwell on them too much; they suffer from the frequent problem of portraying supposedly hyperintelligent beings: they seem capricious and supercilious at best, emotionally retarded at worst.)

I liked the book better after Cley and her companion, Seeker After Patterns, a hyper-evolved and not-at-all-played-for-laughs distant descendant of raccoons, take their leave of the Supras. But the novel also becomes curiously hermetic at that point; Cley and Seeker talk to each other, but not much to others. Still, I enjoyed some of Benford’s descriptions of space-borne life. And Seeker is an interesting character, among the more convincingly rendered non-human intelligences I can recall. (And success in this portrayal is critical to Benford’s overarching thematic goal of exploring the diversity of intelligence.)

I found the novels’s resolution less than satisfying. There’s an element of deux ex machina, which, although the groundwork for it is well laid, still seemed a bit pat. But there’s a lot to admire about Beyond Infinity; it was certainly thought-provoking and I suspect it will be memorable as well.

needs more demons? it’s a bit hard for me to distinguish between “flaws” and things are just not to my taste.

* when I read the afterword I learned that Beyond Infinity is actually an expansion and reworking of an earlier sequel to a Clarke book.

What I was after was simple: the end of the record industry as we knew it. I wanted to see the collapse of the major labels’ stronghold on music . . . since we despised the way they did business, we figured we’d be only too happy to stand by and watch it happen.

Benatar’s co-writer Patsi Bale Cox remains very unobtrusive throughout, the book feels very much like sitting down for a long and engaging conversation (well, monologue) with Benatar.

needs more demons? no.

A sextet of short stories by D. Harlan Wilson opens the collection. Wilson is big on present tense, and characters with attributes instead of names: “the man in the silver handlebar mustache”, “the little boy”, “a bodybuilder in a purple spandex G-string.” He favors dream-like illogic over anything resembling coherent plot. His prose is often very concrete and mechanical: “[He] sniggered, then began moving his tongue around the insides of his mouth so that his cheeks poked out.” Wilson claims Kafka as in influence to the extent that he titled a short story collection The Kafka Effect, but nothing drives these stories the way Kafka’s paranoia and the tension between the individual and society/The State drove his. None of them really grabbed me.

Bizarro first came to my attention via the impressively lurid titles of Carlton Mellick III’s novellas, here represented by The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. It’s probably not a bad litmus test: the titular object is not a molded toy-in-the-shape-of, it’s an actual clone of the Savior, and if this seems simply too offensive or too mechanically improbable, then Mellick is probably not for you. The shock-for-its-own-sake aspect leaves me cold, but beyond that the obvious metaphor of (ahem) internalizing belief systems and its consequences on a couple whose beliefs become disparate is explored with something approaching emotional resonance. Meanwhile the nightmarish milieu doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems to make sense to Mellick’s narrator; there’s something approaching internal consistency. I might cautiously experiment further with Mellick.

I didn’t enjoy Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals while I was reading it, but its grotesque imagery has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. And I have to admit that while marrying the hoary last-man-and-woman-in-post-apocalyptic-wasteland cliché with the popular notion that cockroaches are the critters most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust struck me as a tad obvious (not to mention really gross), I had never read anything quite like it.

Kevin L. Donihe’s The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports was for me the anthology’s first clear win. It has some weak spots — the back and forth between a pair of news commentators seemed trite, but on the whole it was surprising and held my interest. I may have a soft spot for it in part because the “sport” is cycling (and not, as the title might have led you to expect, copulation).

Gina Rinalli’s Suicide Girls in the Afterlife seemed a bit too familiar — a bit of Neil Gaiman, a dash of Kelly Link, a dollop of Beetlejuice — but if it’s maybe too indebted to obvious sources, I like those sources. Promising.

Andre Duza’s Don’t F(beep) with the Coloureds goes in quite a different direction than its inflammatory title might suggest. It reminded me a lot of a 1988 film, only (naturally) darker, and grosser. I liked the story-in-story structure (although I would have liked to see it pushed a little further) and thought some of the expository chunks could have been more smoothly integrated, but give it a qualified thumbs up overall.

Vincent Sakowski offers up one two short-shorts, one of which feels a bit like a Robyn Hitchcock song rendered in prose, and one which is tired and vile, and the pretty nifty long short story “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok.” Its embittered modern couple, Vogue and GQ, have just enough depth to be more than tropes, and the intrusion of mythic elements offered a few interesting twists. The mood reminded me a bit of Leslie What’s “The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City,” only (naturally) darker and grosser. I may seek out more from Sakowski, although the story I really disliked leaves me somewhat distrustful.

I was a little annoyed by a persistent tic of Steve Beard’s Survivor’s Dream: it uses a boatload of definitive articles, maybe to evoke a childlike narrative voice: “She was hiding in this ship”, “It had a domed roof held up by these thick white pillars,” et cetera. It seemed excessive, but afterward it occurred to me that plenty of writers from the lit’ry side of the street play with not dissimilar tactics, e.g., Kathy Acker or even Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” (Of course I’m sometimes annoyed by those, too). Other than that, Beard manages a kind of impressive balancing act between multiple, contradictory narrative threads tied together by a pervasive mood and Beard’s flat, unmusical prose. I would have liked it better if it had been shorter.

John Edward Lawson’s Truth in Ruins is one of the most hyperbolic entries in the entire anthology. In Lawson’s grim future humanity is divided into serial killers and profilers, with genetically engineered “Humanzees” poised to take over after humanity’s failure. It’s self-consciously, cartoonishly, uber-violent, and narrative chunks are jammed together in ways that emphasize their incongruities, like a movie made of nothing but jump cuts. I sort of liked it, although I had to skim over some stomach-turning bits.

Three of Bruce Taylor’s short stories, “The Breath Amidst the Stones” and “A Little Spider Shop Talk,” and “Of Tunafish and Galaxies” are perhaps the most conventional entries in the collection: weird, for sure, but coherent, reminiscent of Leiber and Lafferty. I liked them. I thought the last, “City Streets” was less successful.

needs more demons? maybe kinda sorta