I fared better with it this time around, although I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success. It opens with the world in a Cuban Missile Crisis-ish moment of nuclear terror. Charles Wallace, with the aid of yet another otherworldly companion, must avert catastrophe through an arduous series of jaunts through time (with some of the might-have-been aspects of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol).

The villain with his finger on The Button is one of a pair of brothers, one peaceable and noble, one hawkish and power-mad, who cyclically reenact their conflict throughout many generations. Charles Wallace must restore the balance to save the world.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is far more ambitious than A Wrinkle in Time or A Wind in the Door — it has a rigorous formal structure derived from a medieval prayer. L’Engle uses legends of ancient Welsh visitors to the New World to symbolize clashes between innocence and worldliness.

The characters enmeshed in similar conflicts over the centuries also have similar names, and sometimes I had a little trouble keeping the generations straight. (Then again, so does one of the characters in the story.) As on a my first reading, I thought it was a bit heavy-handed, rather obvious, and a little repetitive. I also think that some of L’Engle’s pasts are portrayed more convincingly than others.

But this this time around I was more aware of the music of L’Engle’s prose — there are some lovely and vivid moments, and overall I found it more satisfying.

needs more demons? possibly.

I think this was mostly because of Proginoskes, an unusual and seriously awesome character.

But it’s not possible for me to sustain my former opinion of the novels’ relative merit this time around. The events in A Wind in the Door clearly happen after those in A Wrinkle in Time, but the characters seem curiously unaware of those events — they have to go through the passage of disbelief deal all over again. Some fantasists — Tim Powers comes to mind — employ this deliberately, with the implication that the human mind blots out events that violate our understanding of the universe as soon as they’re over. (Characters in some of Powers’ fiction have their most explicit encounter with the unreal when they’re pretty much blotto, which helps.) But first, there’s zero textual support for this interpretation in A Wind in the Door, and second, it runs counter to the thematic content of the novels, which is about increasing mental openness and spiritual awareness. Speaking of which . . .

They’re basically the same book, thematically. Meg has to move a little farther along the same path, but it is pretty clearly the same path, and even the nature of the specific plot threat is somewhat similar.

Other things that struck me:

• Since I made a big deal of the explicit Christian textual references in “Wrinkle,” I should probably mention that it’s dialed way, way down here, and mixed with a healthy dollop of pantheism.
• There’s some pretty cool scientific extrapolation/invention, but also some sloppy stuff, with “parsec” being used as a unit of time one of the most glaring. (Just like Star Wars!)
• At a certain point the novel gets kinda amazingly non-concrete. I was actually reminded a wee bit of Woolf’s The Waves.

needs more demons? Mmmaybe. But I do still love it.

• Yowza, one of my all-time favorite novels starts with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Did she do that on purpose? I feel like almost any editor in the current decade would just stop there. It wasn’t L’Engle’s first novel, but still.
• As a kid, I didn’t think of this as a particularly Christian book. I was probably kind of obtuse, I don’t remember really noticing the Christian symbolism in Narnia either, until The Last Battle, where it sort of whops you over the head with an anvil. So this time I was more aware that L’Engle frames her good-versus-evil conflict in a context that’s congruent with Christianity. Narnia aside, explicit Christian references seem a bit more prevalent throughout than I remember from other children’s/young adult fantasies. Maybe if I revisit Cooper’s Dark is Rising cycle I’ll just find further evidence of my former obtuseness.
• This book was published in 1962 (and according to Wikipedia written even earlier). A few aspects betray its age — some dated slang mostly, and Calvin’s behavior toward Meg seems a little presumptuous in spots. But it’s striking how current, even progressive, most of this is. A tough, but credibly fallible, girl hero! Her equally tough scientist mom!
• Speaking of which, there are strains of Christianity that are either implicitly or even explicitly anti-science. They draw a lot of media attention and sadly have a lot of influence on school textbooks in some districts. L’Engle is not that sort of Christian at all. Huzzah!
• Wow, what a long, long shadow this book has cast. When this book was released, I don’t think anyone would have described young adult (or “tween,” ugh) fantasy as a genre — because there was Narnia, The Hobbit, this, and darned little else. Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe books, I suppose, maybe a few others. And by 1962 I suspect Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander’s first novels were well underway. But still, I think you could make a case that this book is about as influential on young adult fantasy as The Velvet Underground and Nico was on indie rock.
• Wow, that ending seems abrupt. Both the resolution of the conflict, and the wrap-up after it. I think an author in the current climate would have been encouraged to pad it out a lot more, if not to stretch the plot across multiple sets of covers.
• I won’t confess to how long ago I last read this, but it’s got to be decades, plural. And there were whole chapters I’d so nearly forgotten that I didn’t know quite was next. But oh my goodness, there were whole paragraphs I could literally still quote verbatim. I could feel them getting near: here comes the ant metaphor of travel via warped space, and the moment where I know both what Meg can’t do and what she can do.

needs more demons? Of course not. Goes without saying.

Two minor quibbles: especially since Wicked Appetite is tied to the Stephanie Plum books by shared characters, I’d expect Evanovich to make a point of differentiating narrator Lizzy Tucker from Plum. But Evanovich gives Tucker a similar background (the whole high school humiliation/blossoming ugly duckling thing) and temperament. It makes Wicked Appetite feel a bit more familiar than it really needs to, especially in the early chapters. And the dénouement felt a little rushed. But overall this exceeded my expectations.

needs more demons? not really.

On the other hand, this is a pretty creepy book. Narrator Will crushes hard unsurprisingly, on his step-sister Lulu in adolescence. Initially she seems — to him, at least — to reciprocate his unsiblingly feelings, but after the set-up chapters it becomes clear — to everyone except Will — that she doesn’t anymore. And Will. Does. Not. Let. Go. He’s gripped by the fallacious notion that there’s some magic formula that will rekindle Lulu’s affection for him. It leads him to do some pretty shitty stuff, and at times it was difficult for me to ride along in Will’s head. (Narrator Will is looking back from an unspecific older/sadder/wiser vantage point and frequently reminds the reader that he’s “not proud” of this or that; I read this as an attempt on Evison’s part to ameliorate Will’s unsympatheticness, but it didn’t quite work for me. And maybe I should admit that I’m not a stranger to the “find a way to make her love me again” myth, because that probably impacted my gut emotional reaction to Will’s transgressions.)

It made perfect sense to me that one of the novel’s back-jacket pull-quotes was from Tim Sandlin. All About Lulu has a slightly similar dynamic to Sandlin’s Skipped Parts, particularly that the viewpoint character is dramatically less emotionally mature than the more worldly crush object. My reaction also followed a similar dynamic; I was initially charmed by Skipped Parts, but found it (and the following books) increasingly disturbing as they progressed.

I’m curious to see what’s next from Evison; I hope he explores some different thematic territory.

needs more demons? I actually felt there was a demon surfeit, although maybe that’s in part because the book woke up some of my own.

You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are.

and a little later:

Not because I’m Danny or he’s me or any of that shit — this is all just stuff a guy told me.

Danny’s story is a really terrific updated gothic spook story, precisely the sort of tale that John Harwood spins so effectively. The narrator’s story is something quite different: realistic and gritty. I found both equally compelling.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

Judged this way, Soft Maniacs is partially successful. The evolving characters of Jody and Katy are explored through the first-person narration of men involved with them. The best of these stories explore the tension between naturalistic and surrealistic storytelling in lean, direct prose and dialogue. (It should probably be noted — regardless of whether you view it as an asset or detriment — that they’re also mostly pretty dirty.) Estep has a real knack for arresting openings, like

When my wife dumped me, I quite my job at the box factory, left Cleveland, and wandered for a few months. I didn’t like my wife that much anyway. And I hated Cleveland.

and

I had a rambing apartment in Brooklyn and I fucked my girlfriend Jody in every part of it. So did a lot of other people.

and

Sometimes I can’t believe the shit that comes out ofmy teeth. When I’m flossing I mean. Huge helpings of white gunk. Amazing that that kind of thing can be in there, in my own goddamned mouth, and I don’t even know about it.

But the book is let down by the concluding story “One of Us”, which revisits the territory of “Tools,” with some unconvincing twists that (it seems to me) are designed to provide exactly the sort of overall thematic linkage that a collection of linked short stories doesn’t actually need.

needs more demons? just a smidge.