Stranger In a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961)

I take in a lot more horror and fantasy than I do science fiction, but I've read a few of the classics: 1984, Farenheit 451, Foundation, Brave New World. I picked up Stranger In a Strange Land as part of my attempt to read to completion all the books I started back in elementary school or junior high and never finished. I loved reading as a kid, but didn't always have the attention span for some of these books, and as a result would read a hundred, two hundred, or in the case of this one, three hundred pages, of a novel before discarding it for something else.

I've mostly gotten around to reading all the stuff I only half-completed years ago, and was happy to give Stranger In a Strange Land another shot (these days I only quit a book partway through only if it's absolutely un-readable, and most of the stuff I passed on when I was a kid certainly didn't fall into that category).

The only other Heinlein familiar to me is a collection of short stories called Menace From Earth. Stranger In a Strange Land, by its reputation, compared to his other books and stories, is his more "serious" work. Personally, I find the adventurous stories in Menace From Earth considerably more entertaining, but Stranger is certainly a good one, and I'm sure I got more from it than when I'd first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old.

Valentine Michael Smith, the Man From Mars, is born to human parents, scientists from Earth sent on a mission to Mars. He's subsequently raised by Martians and took on their ways. He's taken back to earth a couple decades after his birth, and his ideas inevitably clash with those of the humans with whom he attempts to acclimate himself.

Smith is capable of extraordinary acts of teleportation, levitation, and a disturbing ability to make objects and people disappear. He's a peaceful guy, and only wants to love his friends, impart his wisdom to the humans, but where he's from, dying, or "discorporating," isn't that big a deal, and when you discorporate, you simply move on to the next level of existence, becoming what the Martians refer to as an "Old One." And so, though he means no harm by it, it's no big deal to him to kill people who pose a threat to him. He learns, kind of like the Terminator,

why he can't do this, why it's different than on Mars--but unlike the Terminator, he never really seems to get it.

Smith, with help from Dr. Jubal, a sort of father figure, an

d Jill, his nurse and friend, comes to prominence living among the humans, with the President of the U.S. as his personal accountant. He eventually finds his way to a bizarre church that professes a sort of Christianity tinged with New Age craziness. Their prophet, Digby, dies early in the story, and is said to join their previous, and head, prophet, Foster, in the sky. Smith takes what he's learned from the Fosterites, decides it matches in part his Martian religious views, and develops his own church, with himself as high priest.

Here's the major part of the book I can't get into. All this talk

of Old Ones, scorned by Jubal, and believed wholly by Jill and other followers of Smith's, and Foster and Digby, is quite fasincating, and good for some multiple-page theological debates between the main characters, but midway into the book, appears the first of a series of brief sections in which Foster and Digby, up in heaven, adorned with halos, discuss, in a somewhat humorous manner, the goings on below, and the facts of the Man From Mars and the Old Ones.

For my money, it'd be better to leave the Old Ones and the two god-prophets to the area of speculation. I might've bought what Michael was saying anyway, and believed the Old Ones really had sent him to Earth on a fact-finding mission, that they were indeed real, without needing it so bluntly stated in a series of three short sections that clash with the rest of the narrative.

The novel loses some of its steam after that, and it's never quite as good as its first hundred-fifty, two hundred pages, but there are some interesting debates towards the end, with the skeptical Dr. Jubal finding it harder to make excuses for the bizarre supernatural occurrences surrounding himself and the Man From Mars.

I have a feeling I'd prefer some of Heinlein's more pulpy novels, though there's a lot to like about Stranger In a Strange Land, and it offers, perhaps, more for the reader to think about and consider.

My Fantoms by Théophile Gautier (1830s - 1870s)

Richard Holmes's 1976 translation.

Mark and I talk about books.

Mark Rooster:  I have some thoughts on this book, but I'm not sure I have them in order here, so I'll just start.

I like the similarities in the titles of these stories. They're all connected thematically, and the simple titles, "The Poet," "The Priest," etc. fit with that.

The writing style is pleasant to read, very poetic but with some quite direct humor mixed in. I love the ending of "The Painter," where the narrator declares, "The reader will think, no doubt, that this is a very commonplace ending to a very unusual story. But he must take it or leave it. I would not utter a single false word. I would rather cut my throat."

There's another line that made me laugh, but I can't recall which story it was from. It's a line regarding a dog, whose sole purpose in life was to provide a shaggy black foreground over a green background.

Many (or all) of these seven stories deal with madness, insanity, and the possibility of supernatural interference of a romantic nature. I feel like with a couple of the stories, rational explanations might be acceptable, and in the others there are most certainly supernatural things going on.

"The Adolescent." There's less discussion in this one about the possibility of hallucination or madness, and it's told more directly, a woman climbs out of a painting, to come to the narrator.

"The Priest." Here the storyteller says quite plainly that he is unsure whether the events he describes happened in a dream or real life. But it seems more like he's saying that as a last-ditch sort of effort to deny what's happened. Because even his superior by the end believes he's been courting a demon.

"The Opium Smoker." I take this one as simply a drug-induced hallucination.

"The Actor." In this story, the Devil himself is involved, and there isn't much discussion about the reality of events.

"The Tourist." This one could go either way. And lastly, "The Poet"--this story threw me off a little bit. It seems less like the others. I'm only halfway through Richard Holmes' introduction (I wanted to save that for after reading the stories, as sometimes the intros in these collections give away more than I want to know prior to reading), but I saw in there that this one is nonfiction?

M. Buozis:  I agree. The thematic connections between the pieces seem to be twofold. First, each, with the possible exception of "The Poet," deals with the dark power of desire. Secondly, there is a supernatural element that is questionably created by the arousal of the protagonist. I was never sure whether Gautier meant his fantoms to be anything more than the manifestation of his desire for women.

Even the Devil in "The Actor" seems like just an extension of the narrators strange uncontrollable utterances. It's almost as if he's created the devil to explain his own devilish behavior. In "The Priest" I never thought of the demon woman as an actual spirit, but only as demonic in the eyes of a holy and celibate priest. Her retinue is described in a supernatural way, but I think the priest is just seeing Africans for the first time and thinking they are the demon's otherworldly helpers.

While Gautier has a fun, relaxed way of telling a story, I thought many of the stories lacked a compelling resolution. This must have been a great lead up to modernism, where the plot is not necessarily integral to the success of the story, but here I was expecting more of a satisfying development of each story. He brings his characters to life in such a vivid way and then lets them drop at the end like puppets who've been abandoned in mid-line.

"The Poet" is not strictly non-fiction. I think it's something like a fictionalized eulogy for his poet body Nerval. In this respect, the piece reminds me of Borges in its radical blending of reality and fiction. Its really meant to be read as truth, and reminds us that in order to enjoy any piece of literature we have to suspend our disbelief and live in the world of the story.

M.R.:  You've got a point there about the resolutions in these stories. They all kind of end in a similar manner. But I like the openness regarding the possibility of supernatural occurences.

After reading the introduction, I have a better understanding of the last story. Did you read the introduction and afterword? I found both to be pretty informative. I guess the afterword is from the original book published in the 70s and the intro was done later on?

M.B.:  Yeah. I read both the introduction and afterword. I think they shed a lot of light on Gautier's importance and the autobiographical nature of many of his stories. You also get a great sense of the romantic nature of his life, and the translators life while he was translating the stories. It helps to further bring together the collection.

I'd also like to discuss, a bit more, Gautier's writing styles. He always creates wonderfully fleshed out settings and characters without ever using showy language or lingering too long on a particular description. It's rare that you find such precise and great writing from a 19th century writer.


M.R.:  I definitely wouldn't figure this for mid-1800's if I didn't know beforehand when it was written. The writing is very fluid, poetic in some places, but also rather modern. Probably the "easiest" to read of any of the classic French authors we've looked as so far. And the humor too; I laughed a few times reading this book.

M.B.:  I'd agree. Despite the dark subject matter, this was a pretty light read, something I wouldn't mind taking to the beach, if I ever went to the beach.

Related Links:

1.  Joy's Blog Review
2.  Bookslut Review

Fireflies by Lacey Reah (2011)

Lacey Reah's Fireflies opens with the narrator, Linda, walking through Central Park, captivated by the fireflies that come out at night. There she is willingly seduced and transformed by a vampire-like creature known as a nymphomite.

The book gets off to a quick start, and from the Central Park scene jumps right into Linda's new life as a nyphomite. These creatures drink blood from their victims, but can only properly feed if the victim is in the throes of an orgasm at the moment of feeding.

Linda holds no grudge against the creature that changed her; she doesn't, in fact, hold onto any kind of nostalgia for her life as a human, and goes through a nightly routine of hunting, seducing, and feeding, and she is, if not happy, at least occupied.

This changes when she meets, and transforms, a woman named Jesse, who subsequently lashes out at her, condemning her for turning her into a nyphomite, instead of simply killing her. For the first time since being changed, Linda feels something human within her, and is forced to contemplate what she left behind in her first life.

Reah keeps the action moving along at a fast pace, while exploring the various moods and emotions Linda struggles with in her new form. It's about halfway into the 95-page book that Linda is confronted with Jesse and what she's done to her. Soon, the complacent but active character we've been with for the first fifty pages transforms, and what we have is a wounded, suddenly regretful vampire, who even takes a shot at going home, knowing there's no future for her there.

It isn't easy to make a sympathetic character out of someone who happily sucks the blood out of anybody who looks like easy prey, but Reah pulls it off pretty well. Linda is pretty much doomed from the beginning, and by the second half of the story, you wish there was some way out for her, despite her easy adoption of her new bloody appetite.

Fireflies is available in paperback and e-book formats, and can be purchased at the folowing links. The Lacey Reah/Fireflies myspace address is listed below.

http://www.amazon.com/Fireflies-Lacey-Reah/dp/145028163X
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Fireflies/Lacey-Reah/e/9781450281638/?itm=1&USRI=lacey+reah+fireflies

http://www.myspace.com/lindafireflies

Duma Key by Stephen King (2008)

 

Mark and I discussed Duma Key over at Goodreads.  Here's the transcript of our monumental conversation.

M. Buozis:  So, let me get this big criticism out of the way. I really enjoyed about 75% of this novel. King has a way of creating believable, likable middle class characters, seamlessly incorporating their thoughts and actions and all sorts of pop culture references. For the most part he leaves the supernatural elements in the background. For 75% of most of his novels these elements seems more psychological than other-worldy. And then King explains everything for you, leading up to the climax, and the supernatural elements are so much harder to swallow because he's done such a great job of creating believable characters in a rich setting.

So, here, he ruins the novel with pirate ghosts. Edgar's wonderfully strange powers are shucked off as the corruption of an ancient sea witch. His love for his daughter and his fear for her going out in the world, which are the emotional touchstones of the novel, are given short shrift to a fleet of zombies.

I don't like it. He's done this in most of his other novels, and usually fails for me, with a few important exceptions like The Shining.

But I guess he's got to give the people what they're after so...

Mark Rooster:  I'm going to agree with you here, although I think I probably liked the book a little more than you did.

This one is written in a slightly different style than I've come to expect from King--would you agree on that? It has almost more of a . . . I don't know, old-fashioned sort of style to it? I don't think that's quite the word I'm looking for. But it's definitely got less of his creative grammar and style, with half-sentences in parentheses and italics all throughout. It seems like he was going for something a little different with this one.

I enjoyed that, and the story hit me pretty well, until the last two hundred pages or so. But all the explanation about the ghost ship and the old lady's family got tiring after a while, and I found that I just didn't care too much what was really going on.

I'd have been fine with the story sticking to those elements you mentioned, even if no explanation was ever given regarding Edgar's new artistic ability.

M.B.:  I guess the important distinction I'd make between King's novels and stories that I like a lot and the ones that are ruined by the endings, is that the supernatural elements in the good ones always seem completely vital and character-driven. In The Shining for instance, the supernatural elements are so linked with Jack Torrance's alcoholism that the problems become almost indistinguishable. The same could be said about Carrie. We know from the beginning this girl has some strange powers and it is vital to the story that she use them to get back at all the kids who are screwing with her. Here in Duma Key, and in a few other King novels I've read, most notably 'Salem's Lot, the supernatural element doesn't even seem necessary. It almost seems like an afterthought he contractually has to include so his publishers can rest assured that they've got another best seller on their hands.

As far as the style is concerned, I didn't notice much of a deviation from what I've come to expect from King. I think he did a bit of the cutting off sentences and using weird indefinite perspectives, especially in the sections that were all italics. I love how he references pop culture all the time. Most writers can not pull this off, but he seamlessly interjects rock lyrics into conversation through the chummy rapport of Edgar and Wireman.

He's a master of making likable characters. I thought Wireman and Edgar's shrink Kamen were particularly likable. This seems like almost an archetype for King characters. Most of his books include a person who is benevolent to the main character, almost a father figure that guides both the main character and the reader through some crazy stuff.

M.R.:  Your last sentence immediately reminded me of the old guy in Pet Sematary (I can't remember his name at the moment). I think you're right about that, he does use that kind of character a lot in his books. Kamen was a great sidekick for Edgar in this one.

I tend to like King's books more often than not. There are a few of his I haven't thought were all that great, but of his more recent ones that I've read (and though I'm catching up, I'm still not that up on his stuff from the last fifteen years), this was one of the best. But I agree that the supernatural stuff was handled less artfully than in some of his other novels.

M.B.:  One thing I really did enjoy was King's handling of Edgar's new found talent for painting. The way he describes the paintings, the odd juxtapositions and surreal descriptions, is convincing and believable. While non-supernatural art does not have the power that Edgar's paintings seem to have, the idea that a painting can affect people in some way is intriguing. Some questions every artist asks himself are, 'how does my art actually affect people?' or 'does my art make a difference?' Here Edgar gets an answer to these questions, but not in a favorable one at all. He would've been better off painting pictures that were less powerful both as valuable art and conduits for negative energy.

The whole art scene in this small Florida city is also rendered really well. The small time curators and art critics who take themselves very seriously and who know how to turn a profit come off as genuine.

Kamen and Wireman both reminded me a bit of the cook from The Shining. They all seem to have some connection to some other realm (which is all probably explained in some other King book) and use that connection to protect the lead characters.

Then perhaps the most important thing is the relationship between Edgar and his daughter Ilse.

M.R.:  I liked the stuff with Ilse quite a bit. Was sad to see her get killed. Although not as sad as if she'd been in the book a bit more. Though I don't have any suggestions as to how there could have been more material with her.

M.B.:  I think this father-daughter relationship is at the heart of the book. In a way, Edgar comes off as a bit of a materialistic jerk at the beginning of the novel. Through Ilse, we see that he is a caring father, if not a completely fair father (especially in his preference for Ilse over his other daughter). If Ilse wasn't so central to Edgar's recovery and his art, there'd almost be nothing the ghost could do to him that would hurt him. He'd lost everything else, his ex-wife, his physical capability.

The question is, what does Ilse really have to do with this ghost? Is she just the conduit through which the ghost attacks Edgar and then uses him to wreak havoc. And what gain does the ghost have in killing everyone it does? Is it protecting Duma Key? Is it collecting souls for a ghost ship armada? King doesn't make it clear.

M.R.:  I guess it could just be a pissed off ghost who enjoys causing trouble and havoc in Edgar's life?

M.B.:  But then it has no emotional resonance. It's just bad luck.

M.R.:  Yeah, I see what you're saying. I really think the last two hundred or so pages of this book are somewhat of a letdown. Not a letdown on the level of the mechanical spider at the end of the movie version of "IT," but still a letdown.

What did you think of the epilogue? I found it pretty satisfying. The way Wireman ended up dying kind of randomly, and Edgar was basically left by himself. Very much of a downer, but it worked great. I wonder if he recovered the other paintings.

M.B.:  Yeah, I liked the epilogue. The ending definitely needed to remain melancholy, but at least King didn't have everyone die. That might have been too much of a bummer, in a book that was pretty melancholy throughout.

M.R.:  It's definitely one of his saddest novels. I liked reading that in close time with Sarah Langan's "The Keeper." Two very sad ghost stories.

In the clip below, King discusses Duma Key.

Friday the 13th YA Series, by Eric Morse

About five years ago, a company called Black Flame put out a series of Friday the 13^th-inspired novels, featuring Jason Voorhees in all his post-Jason X, but pre-remake, glory. Being a massive Friday the 13^th fan, I was curious to check these books out—but after reading their basic plot summaries, I lost interest. The stories sounded ridiculous and barely resembled the Friday the 13^th I’d grown up with, that was such an important part of my childhood (if you think it's ridiculous that Friday the 13th would be an important part of anyone's childhood, then welcome to the low-brow portion of our website). These stories seemed to have more in common with the later films in the series, the ones that strayed from the basic slasher formula in hopes of creating something different.

For the record, normally trying to do something different is admirable, preferable to just spitting out the same thing over and over. But not with slashers and not with Friday the 13^th. Innovation isn’t necessary with this franchise; and not only isn’t it necessary, it’s traditionally looked down upon by the most hardcore fans of the series.

So I didn’t order the Black Flame books. Maybe if they were 200 pages, I would have, but at 400-plus . . . I mean, it’s Friday the 13^th, OK, what the hell were they gonna do for 400 goddamn pages? A few months ago, I decided that I might like to check out the novels after all. I read a lot, and I’ll happily admit my tastes include classics, serious literature, and also some pretty silly stuff. Unfortunately, by the time I’d decided I’d be willing to part with a few bucks for these Black Flame novels, they’d gone out of print and were no longer available for a few bucks.

Looking for the Black Flame books inspired me to re-read the Young Adult horror series written by Eric Morse in 1994. After New Line acquired the rights to the Friday films and put out Jason Goes To Hell, they commissioned a line of books to cash in on the series' name and on the popular YA horror market. This was the time of R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike, before the arguably more talented J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer. Now, I mention those two names while fully aware that neither of those authors write horror. There doesn't seem to currently be as much interest in straight up scary stories in today's YA market; it's more fantasy, dark as that fantasy might be. But in the early 90's, the money makers were horror titles.

Eric Morse (real name William Pattison) wrote four books, all under 200 pages, in the "Camp Crystal Lake Series." He had plans for more, but the series was canceled after the fourth, Road Trip, was released (and very recently, on his website, the author posted the final chapter, going a chapter at a time, for a period of months, of his "fifth Crystal Lake book"). It's hard to imagine why Berkley and New Line would come up with the idea of a book series cash-in on a popular film franchise, only to short that series on advertising, to the point that even today, many fans who've seen every Friday the 13th film aren't aware of the Camp Crystal Lake books.

It seems New Line's only stipulation on granting the rights for print was that the novels couldn't actually feature the Jason Voorhees character. Bummer, right? I mean, it didn't work in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning [1985]. But recall, that movie was a piece of shit in general, and the reason for its failure wasn't simply the guy-disguised-as-Jason "surprise". The concept Morse came up with, having a different character stumble across the famous Jason Voorhees hockey mask in each story, becoming possessed by his spirit, and carrying out murderous acts on local townsfolk and traveling teenagers, works surprisingly better than you might think.

I got a kick out of these books when they came out. I was in junior high, and a fan of all kinds of horror fiction, including the YA stuff, and nearly jumped out of my pants when I came across these books. I read them with great joy, realizing they were what they were, not exactly Shirley Jackson or Stephen King, but exactly what I wanted--the printed equivalent of the gory, crazy, and often silly horror franchise that I loved so much.

Morse got the tone of the films down with his novels. Despite the YA target audience, the novels are full of ridiculous amounts of violence, high body counts, and inventive death scenes. And they respect the source material. Nothing in the books contradicts anything in the films (which contradicted each other constantly). Morse even takes the time to look a little deeper into the town of Crystal Lake, something else that was rarely done in the films.

In the first book, Mother's Day, a backwoods hunter puts on the hockey mask and terrorizes some kids staying at the long closed campgrounds. The second book, Jason's Curse, involves the sister of one of the kids killed in Mother's Day, as she and her friends set out for the cursed campgrounds, seeking revenge. There's a nice continuity with this series; each book is its own story but makes references to the previous entries.

The third, The Carnival, has a traveling carnival dumb enough to set up shop on, yes that's right, the old campgrounds. I don't know if these guys never watch the news or what, but no one seems to be aware of the camp's legendary murder sprees. It's the same non-logic the movies follow, and I love it (though, thankfully, it never gets quite as silly as some of the goings-on in New Line's Jason Goes To Hell, which was released a year before these books). The fourth book, Road Trip, has a skinny dork putting on the mask and taking revenge on the van-ful of jocks he's been stranded with in the woods outside the camp.

When I read over these books recently, they took me on kind of a nostalgic trip back to my junior high days. Sometimes you pick up something you loved as a kid, to check it out again, and you're disappointed. But with the Camp Crystal Lake books, I found myself pleasantly surprised. If you're a Friday the 13th fan and are unaware of these novels, they're worth checking out, if you can get hold of some used copies. Clearly written by a fan of the series.

Eric Morse / Friday the 13th YA websites:

http://f13bloodbath.homestead.com/preview.html

http://www.outpostvevetta.com/

http://www.myspace.com/f13_bloodbath

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (1990)

The adaptation of older stories into more contemporary forms, particularly those which were adapted from archaic forms, epic poems, oral legacies, mythical texts, into novels and films, has always fascinated me, both for its rarely satisfactory execution and for the very mechanics of making a popular piece of art from ancient material. In many ways this process is akin to exhuming a Mousterian bowl from your backyard and selling it at Ikea. The critical reception of such exercises always dissuades me from reading or watching them. From Robert Graves's stodgy 1934 novel I, Claudius to Robert Zemeckis's ill-imagined 2007 film Beowulf, most strict adaptations seem to be trying a little too hard to stick to the fictional facts. Give me the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou. You can keep Wolfgang Peterson's Troy. Give me Styron's The Confession of Nat Turner. Keep Madison Smartt Bell's Haiti novels.

In her 1990 novel Thomas the Rhymer, Ellen Kushner, famous for a string of fantasy novels she published in the 80s and 90s and as the host of public radio’s Sound and Spirit tackles the legend of True Thomas, a 13^th century Scottish minstrel and purported prophet. You can read more about Thomas and some of his prophecies at this informative wiki page. Kushner uses four narrators to tell the tale of Thomas’s adoptive family, his exodus in Elfland, and his romance with a milkmaid named Elspeth. It all sounds pretty kooky in synopsis, but Kushner manages to tell her story in an engaging and earthy way. Surprisingly, the least deft of these four narratives comes from Thomas himself. When Kushner hands the narrative over to Gavin, a farmer, or his wife Meg, or Elspeth, we start to see some of the shades of reality seeping through the story. Thomas’s own tale is of nothing more than an orgiastic trip to the land of the elves. Kushner renders this fantasy in a dreamlike psychedelia that only occasionally borders on the inane, as when the elf queen’s brother becomes an orange flame and fights for Thomas’s fate. However, we see from the simpler folk around Thomas that he may have made all of this up to cover up his own gallivanting womanizing ways. The novel’s real worth lies in this examination of reality and the power of storytelling and song in shaping the narratives that are believed in the present and remembered in the future. While the elfin queen and the wondrous feasts denied to Thomas may have some significance as an allegorical digression about the limits of escape and emigration, the uncertainty of Elspeth’s fate is at the heart of the drama here. Thomas manipulates the conventions of the period to his advantage when he asks Elspeth if she would accompany him on his journeys, knowing full well she would risk her standing in the community by running around with an unmarried man. It is her life which is wasted by his flight. Of course, Kushner’s book is a romance, so Elspeth forgives Thomas and they live in happiness until the end of their days and bear many great children together. The end.

In all cases, Kushner renders her novel in a clear and uninflected style, which is infinitely more effective than trying to capture the language of the Scots phonetically, or intersperse archaic words and phrases. Her use of evocative perspectives reminds me of Styron or Faulkner without the arch literary pretension. While most fans of traditional fantasy might bemoan a lack of dragons and magic and violence, I find Kushner’s novel much more revealing about human nature than the average bit of swords and sorcery.

Oh, and how about the dust jacket pictured above. Not Nice Jacket material, that's for sure. I much prefer Kate Greenaway's watercolor below.

The City and the City by China Miéville (2009)

The City and the City recently won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel of 2010. Never having followed contemporary fantasy, I decided to start with a writer I'd heard much about over the years but never considered reading before. While The City and the City doesn't strike me as more fantasy than science fiction, I think the many distinctions between genres are often harmful and confine writers and readers in the scope of their imaginative abilities. In fact, part of our aim here at The Bent Spine, is to liberate genre fiction from its dearth of critical attention. While Miéville doesn't provide us with ghouls and goblins, dragons and warriors, he does embed a thought-provoking concept in a highly readable detective story that borders on the high political intrigue of John le Carré at his strongest. While I don't have much to compare it with, The City and the City deftly avoids the pitfalls of many science fiction and fantasy cliches. Miéville's vision is gritty and uncompromising in its ambiguity.

Inspector Borlu is investigating a crime in his dystopian home city-state of Beszel, when he becomes embroiled in a cross border conspiracy involving a secret power lying in the shadows between Beszel and its sister city Ul Qoma. Beszel and Ul Qoma, for the most part, occupy the same topography. They literally inhabit the same physical space. But through an amazing feat of mass self-hypnotism the citizens of either city do not see of interact with the citizens of the other. Only at the border gate of Copula Hall can one look from one city into another without fear of committing breach, the greatest crime possibly, and attracting the wrath of a shadowy authority called, you guessed it, Breach. Borlu examines the multifarious political factions of each city, the differences in culture, police procedure, respect for antiquity and taste in hot beverages. The only thing these two cities share, other than geography, is an intense fear of Breach. Miéville places his cities in a realistic Eastern European locale and makes many references to a geopolitical situation much like our own. This not an alien landscape, but a parable for a Jerusalem transplanted to Europe, where there are no physical barriers between the Israelis and Palestinians other than an odd self-imposed blindness.

Miéville works in a long tradition of political science fiction, the sort of metaphorical story found in the best Philip K. Dick novels and Aldous Huxley. However, he never makes a completely clear political statement, and this saves The City and the City from becoming strictly a novel of ideas. He writes with a keen simplicity that at first seems rigid, but gradually flows into the staccato rhythms of Raymond Chandler. His imagery is always dark. There are no rays of light to be found here. As John Carpenter did in Escape from New York, China Miéville has created a dystopia both believable and entertaining. Though I can't say this is the best contemporary fantasy and science fiction have to offer, The City and the City shows the scene to be thriving with intriguing new work.

Check out this old, but interesting interview with Miéville at The Believer.

Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan (2009)

Today's post will take the form of a conversation between me and Mark.

M. Buozis: I think one of Langan's biggest strengths is her ability to capture the real heart of her down-and-out characters. Audrey's stultifying life in New York City is one I witnessed many times. The 30-something who is chewed up and eaten by the city and aged by it is a theme not often broached in horror fiction.

Audrey's neuroses ring true and they never make her annoying, just more endearing. The back story involving Betty Lucas is never over-powering, but Langan provides just enough detail to make Audrey's journey to sanity emotional and rich.

Mark Rooster: I found her neighbor Jayne to be an even more, as you said, chewed-up, character. I don't think I could even take a story with her as the lead! When Audrey smashes the hula figurine and has that inner-vent about how Jayne's too dumb to realize how unhappy she is, followed by her shouting F you, Jayne! down the hallway, I felt pretty awful for her.

And there's that previous foreshadowing, the kind that sometimes works and is sometimes only annoying (works in this case), that line about "the next time either of them would see Jayne would be in much more unfortunate circumstances." That isn't the exact line, but it's something similar. I found myself thinking, Man, don't be right about that, let Jayne be OK.

M.B.: For me, the little bit of real obvious foreshadowing there was one of the only really weak moments in the book. It seemed somewhat out of place with the rest of the narrative. It's the only sentence in the entire novel where there's a sort of retrospective looking back. I thought it took away from the immediacy of the action. Why tell us something bad is going to happen and not just let us find out for ourselves?

I thought Langan's secondary characters were particularly strong. You're right about Jayne. Though she's intensely annoying, she is very real and very human. Saurab reminds me of a bunch of people I've met who are still holding onto this dream about making films, but living only on the kindness and wealth of their families.

The whole Chaotic Naturalist aspect reminded me of something Borges would do. Langan makes us believe the architecture and social aspects of this strange school of thought could be historical. As usual, I'd almost prefer it if Langan would've left out the supernatural elements and concentrated on the strange allure of the cult.

M.R.: I like how she lists her influences at the beginning of the book. I could definitely see elements of "The Tenant" and "Rosemary's Baby," as well as the others she listed.

I normally don't like the foreshadowing, but in this case, it added to the dread and foreboding I was already feeling, and it didn't throw me off too much. I figured Jayne was an innocent, anyway, and likely wouldn't make it to the final pages.

The Chaotic Naturalism was very intriguing. I even found myself gooogling it--not that I didn't believe Langan had made it up, but it just sounded so strange and yet nearly-possible, that I had to check, to make sure.

M.B.: Oh, yeah. I had to google it too. I think she throws in some references to real architects, like Gaudi, who used non-traditional forms taken from nature in their buildings. I love when authors flirt with the line between reality and fantasy. It draws me into a story much more than a strictly made up universe.

I found a lot of similarities to The Shining here, especially in the way the building uses people's weaknesses against them to make them go crazy. The Breviary, like the lodge in The Shining becomes a character by the end of the novel, and a character with an extremely powerful will.

M.R.: I loved the character of Shermerhorn (I know I got that wrong; I don't have the book right in front of me), in particular the scene in which his demonic figure approaches Audrey; the description of his arms being as long as his legs, and crawling like a spider, was very effective. Rather creepy, for sure.

M.B.: I definitely liked how Schermerhorn ended up being the man in the three piece suit from Audrey's nightmares.

Another aspect of Audrey's character that I particularly enjoyed was the way she could not leave anything to her imagination. She must read every website that pops up on the first page of her google search for The Breviary. She must check under Betty's sheets. She is afraid of what her imagination might create, how the unknown might haunt her.

Oh, and the old people at The Breviary. I can't remember such an effective exploitation of the creepiness of the elderly, particularly the wealthy elderly with their plastic surgery and fancy clothing. The tenants of The Breviary were the most horrifying aspect of this novel.

M.R.: I loved the way one of the chapters about two-thirds of the way in ended with all of the tenants stepping out of their rooms and clapping at once. Freakin scary! There was a lot of excellent imagery in this book. I'm looking forward to reading her other novels.

And you know, you mention the extent of Audrey's OCD--it really is remarkable that Langan could write such a character without her ever getting on the reader's nerves. You can see where she gets to Saurab with some of this stuff, and how it must be absolutely agonizing to live with, but she never gets boring or annoying to read about.

M.B.: The key is Langan only ever mentioned the OCD as it related to the action of the novel. There was no big long exposition about all of Audrey's ticks and obsessions. They all come out while she's battling with The Breviary.

In this respect, Audrey's Door is similar to Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn in which the narrator suffers from Tourette's Sydrome, but the verbal ticks and twitching never overrides the engrossing plot.

M.R.: I suppose if the author only mentions it here and there, as it pertains directly to the rest of the action, it works to give a sense of what this person's like without beating the reader over the head with it.

I find the same technique used sometimes with a writer including a stuttering character. Stephen King's written stutter is pretty creative (for example, "Wuh-wuh-what?" instead of "Wh-wh-what?").

Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy by K.W. Jeter (1987)

If you're paying attention, which you're probably not, you'll notice today's selection is not a horror novel and it's the first time we've reviewed anything here other than horror. We've decided to expand the scope of our discussions to include other types of fantastic fiction not normally given the attention of more traditionally 'literary' works. While many of the books and films we review will be well-known classics within their genres, we also hope to uncover lesser-known works deserving of the attention of the general reader.

Infernal Devices is the first novel I've read in the now well-defined steampunk genre. Steampunk, as I understand it, is set exclusively in a Victorian setting, but contains many of the tropes of standard science fiction, including advanced technologies (though most rely on steam for energy, as opposed to electricity), time travel, alien beings, mysterious plot twists, and juvenile sexuality. While it has its roots in classic proto-sci-fi writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, it was refined in the 1980s by William Gibson, Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter. Here's a decent overview of the most important works in the genre. Jeter coined the term steampunk as a lighthearted response to the growing popularity of certain works outside of the more prevalent cyberpunk movement.

Infernal Devices deals with the bumbling adventures of George Dower, the son of a brilliant watchmaker and developer of advanced automatons. Dower has no specific will in the story, and the outrageous characters he meets and the outlandish events unfolding around him throughout the novel seem more of a brief and frightening interlude to an otherwise purposeless existence. Dower is visited in his father's shop by the mysterious Brown Leather Man who drops off a mechanical device and a strange coin that send Dower down a path leading him to strange piscine boroughs of London and the alien landscape of the Scottish Hebrides. He meets a coin forger, a pair of hustlers with strange futuristic accents, fishmen, elderly mad villains, temperance leaguers, whores, the Godly Army, and real-life selkies. There are several sudden reveals throughout the novel which change our perspective of all the prior events. None of these reveals seems earned by Dower, but only forced on him by a manipulative secondary character. Dower might be the key to destroying the earth, or he might be the key to saving it. The reader is not sure until the last ten pages.

Jeter's greatest strength is his deftness with the Victorian setting. He uses a breezy writing style which is eminently readable, but manages to imbue each scene with the grit and smoke of Dickens or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When Dower walks through Wetwick, we see the shadowy alleys and the lurching denizens. We smell the rot swept into the gutters. Also, concerning the mechanical automatons, Jeter writes with verve. The Paganinicon, which resembles Dower in all ways except for his skill with a violin and another important tool (where lies Jeter's juvenile treatment of sexuality), enforces the fantastic and comedic tone of the novel.

While Infernal Devices is a greatly entertaining read, I feel it's maybe not the best introduction to the steampunk genres. Jeter hits all of the superficial cues. There's magical mechanical technology, flying machines, weird underclasses, secret societies, myths come to life. But one of the most important aspects of the genre, as I understand it, is the punk spirit underneath its most important works. We see no liberating of non-western individuals from the obscurity the Victorians doomed them to. Jeter only briefly addresses the perils of the technologies of the future. I'm not suggesting every novel should involve these themes, but Jeter's novel seems to be on the lighter end of the spectrum of this genre. It's still a pleasant read. I'd just call it more steamgentry than steampunk.

Second Chance by Chet Williamson (1995)

A time traveling future murderer ditches his friends on the way from the 60s to the 90s, in order to adopt an anonymous persona and carry out plots of mass destruction. That's the basic plot of Chet Williamson's Second Chance, and if that sounds weird enough, it gets even weirder when you expand the plot summary.

The hero of the story, a decently likable new age musician named Woody, decides he'd like to relive his past, specifically his college days from over two decades past, and he gets his old friends together, and since he's rich, he's able to rent out the exact same apartment they partied in back in the 60s, and fill it with items and artifacts from that era, recreating, as best he can, a typical partying night from the best time of his life. Back then, his girlfriend and his best friend attempted to blow up a campus ROTC building, only they end up blowing themselves up.

Now, in the present, he and his friends get together at this old apartment, they even dress as they would have in the 60s, and smoke some expensive weed, while sitting in a circle. And they end up traveling back through time, and suddenly their long-dead friends show up. Before long, they reason that they've gotta get back to the present, and they figure, why not take their dead friends with them? It works, too--they get in a circle, smoke the great weed again, and they all come back to the present, where they lead somewhat different, better lives, with their dead friends returned--except, oh, actually, the one guy, he slipped their grasp in the time traveling, and now leads a secret life as a mysterious killer named Pan, who carries out assassinations and mass killings, in the name of saving the planet.

Completely ridiculous plot--but somehow it works as a mostly serious, non-jokey, science-fiction thriller. I've never read anything else by Chet Williamson, but I wonder if his other stories are as completely crazy as this one. It's quite something that he's able to write this in a manner that can be taken seriously. He somehow pulls it off. The method of time travel, in particular, could potentially come off as very silly--something out of a low-budget stoner comedy--but damn if it doesn't work. I found myself enjoying the story so much, I didn't require any more evidence that smoking a joint with friends in a circle can send you back, or forward, through time.

The novel was originally published in 1995 and was re-released in 2002 by Leisure Books, home of a wide range of genre writers. "Second Chance" is a strange blend of horror, science-fiction, and pot, and I highly recommend it.

Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (1910)

One of the things that separates this book very much from its film and stage adaptations is the amount of detail Leroux provides about the Opera's cellars. Some of the details almost seem like fantasy, or at least science fiction, even for current readers. A lake under a functional building? Five cellars in a 19th century urban building? A torture chamber? A 'siren' in the lake protect a fancy house stockpiled with gun powder? Trap doors and fake walls and revolving mirrors? It all seems almost impossible, but Leroux writes it like it's a matter of fact. I haven't watched any of the film or theater adaptations in quite a while, but I remember Erik's layer being more of just a creepy basement. Here it's turned into a magnificent symbol of Erik's almost superhuman abilities and knowledge of physics and illusions. Great stuff.

Erik himself is also made much more of a super-villain here than a tragic monster. Of course, we still get the tragedy in his relationship with Christine, but he's also a mastermind of deception and a bit of sadist. When the Persian relates the story of how Erik grew up in the East, we get a great glimpse of how Erik learned this amazing things. Leroux, of course, makes Erik more than a comic book character by telling us exactly why Erik might be so sadistic and angry at the human race. His mother rejected him, refused to give him any affection unless he wore a mask. No wonder he's such a bastard.

I've noticed with a lot of late-19th century and early-20th century fantastic fiction, authors often used this method, shifting points of view to establish a believable narrative. Dracula is a perfect example. Instead of presenting the story of a vampire as a legend, Stoker manages to create a believable account of what it might be like for a group of people to really encounter a vampire. Here Leroux gives us newspaper accounts and different perspectives from people in the opera and makes his narrator almost a secondary source, a reporter convincing us of the existence of the 'ghost'.

I haven't read much steampunk, but I did pick up a copy of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen about a year ago. Steampunk seems to be a cross between fantastic Victorian literature and science fiction, where 19th century settings are exaggerated in their technology (steam engines and dirigibles are very prominent) and the exoticism of people from the east is very exaggerated. The Phantom of the Opera, in a way, is a proto-steampunk book, in that Erik employs amazing technologies that almost seem magical, and the treatment and inclusion of the Persian is somewhat exceptional for literature of the time.

I certainly like the fact that we don't get too much information about Erik early in the novel. I've been thinking about this, watching some of the old Friday the 13th movies. What made those movies so frightening to me is that you rarely actually see the monster except for a few brief moments and then finally at the end, with the climactic battle. I feel like most horror movies these days show their villains in full light, from the beginning of the picture. While this might be more fun for filmmakers, I think it detracts strongly from the horror value of most new horror films.

That being said, at the end of the first Friday the 13th I think you get a similar reveal, where his mother explains everything that happened to him and why she's killing everyone.

You can check out a nice fan page detailing the film adaptations of the novel here.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)

One of the masters of the subtle, quiet horror Charles L. Grant championed through the 1980s, wrote his most famous ghost story almost one-hundred years before Grant started publishing his anthologies. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, perhaps due to its quiet and ambiguous nature, stands as a monolithic tale, perhaps the most literary of ghost stories. Most of James's novels and stories, other than perhaps Daisy Miller are read today almost exclusively by academics and lit-snobs, but The Turn of the Screw, a novella-length tale, has been popularly adapted for the stage and screen and remains a well-read classic.

As with many other Victorian stories and novels, especially those dealing with ambiguous supernatural events, The Turn of the Screw starts with a framing device integral to the believability, or at least the suspension of disbelief, necessary for such an otherworldly tale. The reader experiences the story of a young governess on an English countryside estate through the lens of a man listening to a friend's tale in an old house on Christmas Eve, beside a roaring fire, in the tenuous comfort of both temporal and physical distance from the tale itself. Unfortunately, James drops this frame completely when the friend starts reading the governess's journal to his audience. The governess, new to her position, at first admires her charges, a ten-year-old boy named Miles and a somewhat younger girl named Flora, for their intelligence and affection. Through a series of minor transgressions the children begin showing themselves as masters of the crumbling estate, visiting with what the governess thinks are ghosts. The children deny the existence of the ghosts, and no one sees them but the governess. Somehow, James creates such startling scenes of haunting, completely motionless almost, the reader does not question the power of the governess's experiences. The first ghost, the estate's dead young chauffeur, appears atop one of the mansion's tall asymetrical towers and stares down upon the governess. The simple expressionless figure creates such a huge sense of tension, the presence of a stranger on the estate becomes an iconic image of horror and invasion the way Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls (1979) uses the phrase 'Have you checked the children?' as an opaque, yet chilling incitement to panic. The remainder of the tale deals with the governess fighting with the stone-faced, far too intelligent children about the existence of the ghosts and their strange sense of rebellion. Miles especially shows himself to be a sociopath in his dealings with the outside world. Of course, the reader receives all of this information from the governess's perspective, so the question of an unreliable narrator is always present in all characterizations.

The Turn of the Screw's influence on subsequent horror stories is less evident in ghost tales and more apparent in novels and films of childhood evil and deviance. James's portrayal of Miles and Flora as eerily perfect, intelligent yet wholly sinister children found a home in a more overtly supernatural novel, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) which was adapted for film as Village of Damned in 1960 and 1995. There's something inherently creepy about a child who has the bearing and manipulative powers of an adult and the self-awareness to place him or herself in the larger world and the vocabulary to explain all of this to his or her keeper. James mastered this without resorting to any definite supernatural elements, but his depiction of children spills over into such occult masterpieces as Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971).

Here's a fun comparison of four filmed versions of Quint at the window.

The Hour of the Oxrun Dead by Charles L. Grant (1987)

I'd never heard of Charles L. Grant, until he died in 2006. Shortly after his death, Cemetery Dance ran a tribute issue to him, devoting two or three story slots to unpublished horror tales he'd written, and quite a bit of laudatory essays and personal accounts from his friends and fans. During his life, he'd been known more for his influential horror anthologies in the 80s, which according to many of the authors featured in the Cemetery Dance tribute issue, offered a haven for more subtle horror that did not depend on gore or extreme violence or gimmicky sci-fi for its entertainment value. I was not too thrilled with his short stories I read in Cemetery Dance but the praise his fellow genre authors spouted, and a quote from Stephen King calling Grant "the premier horror writer of his or any generation" compelled me to pick up an old paperback copy of one of the more popular novels set in his signature Oxrun Station.

The Hour of the Oxrun Dead is a subtle novel of terror, vacillating between a sense of mounting paranoia and the possibility of some real occult activity in sleepy Oxrun Station, a Connecticut village, a haven for small town provincial and a bedroom community for commuters. Natalie, a young, sexy librarian (they only exist in novels and movies, it seems) is the widow of Ben, a police officer in Oxrun who is murdered soon after he and Natalie marry. For some reason, Natalie feels the need to stay in Oxrun, a town that offers her little else but job security, even though she has gotten over the pain of Ben's loss. She starts falling for a young beat reporter for the local weekly paper, Marc, and together they begin to come up with what seem to be grand delusions about the town's upper crust establishment. Grant manages to create a comfortable, almost cozy bit of suburban horror with his very familiar setting and cast of characters - the creepy police chief, the corrupt banker, the old craggy innkeeper, the wicked head librarian, the megalomaniac millionaire. But the implications of the "plot" Natalie and Marc imagine some horrible small town cult enacting don't cross the boundaries of this sleepy little village. In the end, who cares what these folks do with Natalie and Marc. They lose all of their likability when Grant has them frolicking and flirting through the cemetery directly after the funeral of one of Natalie's only friends.

Oxrun Station has the odd, doomed quaintness of Stephen King's Derry or Castle Rock, which is an easy trope for a writer of horror in the 80s. There's no sense of the time period, however, in The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, no sense of an innocent yet excessive mid-80s decadence, which could spruce up the somewhat banal story. The supernatural elements of the novel seem psychological, a quiet muffled background conversation heard behind a tedious plot, like Argento's Suspiria but with little of the physical beauty and grandeur. There's still a tradition of quiet horror, both in literature and cinema, which combats the torture porn aesthetic of movies like Saw and books like Palahniuk's Haunted or the bizarro sub-genre. If Grant is responsible for bringing this approach intact through the 80s, we should thank him for it. I think to understand his true impact on horror, it might be important to read the anthologies he edited and is best known for and let his novels sit on the shelf.

Check out Grant's official website here.

The Lost by Jack Ketchum (2001)

I'd say that Jack Ketchum has slowly been growing on me, except that I've liked his writing ever since I first began reading Off Season, his 1980 novel about cannibals attacking vacationers off the beach. The thing about Ketchum is, his stuff is so violent, so visceral, and downright tragic that his books are somewhat exhausting. I read the sequel to Off Season, the better, equally violent Offspring, and from there moved on to The Girl Next Door (1989), a novel that probably deserves its own article.

The Girl Next Door is one of the most deeply disturbing books I've yet read, and one of the best. The horror is derived from human cruelty, nothing supernatural, the same as his cannibal stories, and when I'd finished I put the book down knowing I'd read something brilliant, but at the same time, I was wholly ready to move on to another book, something lighter to follow it up.

Now, having read The Lost, I think I can safely say I'm hooked and won't be allowing as much time to pass before reading another Ketchum novel.

The Lost tells the story of young adults in the late sixties, hangin' out, partying, trying to get laid--and keeping the awful secret that one of them, their leader, murdered two girls, very randomly, four years before. His name is Ray Pye, a self-obsessed, vain monster of a man, who stuffs his shoes with beer cans in order to rise above his natural five-foot-three, and demands loyalty from the younger kids who buy drugs from him and hang out at his place, and more or less worship at his feet.

Ray's two best friends, Tim and Jennifer, are the only ones who know about the murders. Two cops, one retired, are pretty certain, however, and when the second girl succumbs to her injuries four years later, the cops begin to harrass Ray and his friends, to try and break him down, get him to slip up, so they can finally nail him.

The Lost doesn't contain nearly as much graphic violence as the books I've mentioned above, but when it happens, it's very, very rough. The murders in the prologue are described in explicit detail, leaving the reader to wonder what else could possibly occur in the next 350 pages.

There is a lot of waiting, a lot of tension that builds and builds, an inevitability that at some point, something is going to push Ray over the edge, once again, probably worse than the time before. Ketchum captures the mood of the late sixties, finds parallels with his story and the Manson murders, committed around the same time, and writes believable characters the reader can't help but care and worry about.

Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996)

I’ll start this by saying that I am aware that Clive Barker is not strictly a horror author. I’m sure it’s been somewhat frustrating to him over his career to have carried this label years after writing his last true piece of horror fiction, Cabal, in 1988 (a case could be made, however, for Cold Heart Canyon [2001] or Mister B. Gone [2008], being horror). But his style of fantasy, even his children’s novels such The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (2002 and 2004), are so dark, and contain so many elements of horror fiction, that it isn’t difficult to see why he still gets pegged as a horror author. And, I’m sure his involvement in mainstream horror film series (Hellraiser, Candyman) helped contribute as well.

Anyway, I’m now going to discuss his 1996 novel, Sacrament, which is a fantasy, a parable of sorts, and is not a horror novel, but does, as I said above, contain plenty of horror content, like his other fantasy novels, and thus is suitable for discussion on this blog.

The scope of this novel is not nearly as large as some of his other works. A recurring theme of Barker’s stories is that of a world hidden within our own world; or a doorway from our world leading into another. In Imajica (1991), the heroes of the story travel through Four Dominions, other planes of existence linked to Earth, the Fifth Dominion; the characters in The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994) travel across a mystical dream sea known as Quiddity, to explore the unknown areas lying on the other side. Sacrament, on the other hand, involves a man, Will Rabjohns’, journey across the Arctic, through his hometown in England, and to his new residence in San Francisco. The vivid and fantastic descriptions this time around are focused not on otherworldy places, but right here in our own fantastical world.

One thing Barker does so well in this book is show an enormous appreciation of nature and our planet in general. It isn’t a preachy story, but one doesn’t have to look hard to find an environmental message of sorts. Rabjohns has made a career as a photographer snapping pictures of wildlife in its last throes, species on the verge of extinction. When a polar bear knocks him into a coma, he is taken back through his memories to his childhood, when he came into contact with two bizarre, powerful beings disguised as humans, Steep and Rosa. He finds that it was Steep who, when he was a child, gave him his first taste of death and provided him with his lifelong interest in the end of life, particularly with the extinction of entire species.

Will Rabjohns is the first gay lead in a Clive Barker novel, and sections of the book deal with Rabjohns’ and his friends’ coping with, and understanding of, “the plague,” Barker’s word for AIDS (he also referred to the disease by this name, and this name alone, in Imajica). Indeed there are parallels drawn between the AIDS epidemic, and also the gay lifestyle, and Rabjohns’ and Steep’s respective places in the world. Steep is a man who has lived for hundreds of years and is continuously vexed by the fact that he does not know what he is or where he came from; his entire life is an attempt to reconcile this, to hopefully figure out what he is. He has transformed Rabjohns, in a way, or rather, set his life on a course he otherwise wouldn’t have intended; and because of this, Rabjohns has doubts and questions about his career and motivations. But his identity, who he is as a person, as a gay man and artist, are never unclear to him. His security in himself is in sharp contrast to the murderous Steep, who can never be fully satisfied due to his lack of understanding of himself.

Like Barker’s other novels intended for adults, Sacrament contains some fairly bizarre violent and sexual content, mixed in with scenes of great beauty and some philosophy. He’s stated that this is his lowest-selling novel (I don’t know if that’s still the case). Too bad, because it’s an excellent story, told through flashbacks, with a great pace, startling moments of horror, and is certainly worth reading for fans of dark fantasy, fantastique, fables, or however you’d like to call it.