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?").

Cropsey - dir. by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman (2009)

Cropsey was a maniac, an escaped patient of a mental institution, a bogeyman who scared children sitting around campfires up and down the Hudson Valley of New York state. Like all folklore, no matter how fantastic, the Cropsey legend arises from real fear and guilt, from a dark element of the culture that is so pervasive it shows up in the subconscious of the most innocent and uneducated members of society. The American mental health system throughout the first three quarters of the 20th century was a disgraceful network of overcrowded, understaffed institutions with some of the largest, most disfunctional hospitals located on Staten Island and Long Island. Enter Geraldo Rivera and his crusade to make a change (and get famous).

In their 2009 documentary film Cropsey Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman explore the real life Cropsey tale of a Staten Island derelict, Andre Rand, accused of kidnapping and murdering at least five children on the island in the 70s and 80s. Most famously Rand was convicted of the murder of Jennifer Schweiger, a 13-year-old with Down syndrome. The directors manage to weave an intricate narrative out of a very cloudy, sensitive story, using newsreel footage, interviews with Staten Islanders involved with the case, and an eerie NYPD missing persons detective who seems to think the serial disappearances are all the work of Satanists.

It’s hard to create horror out of real life, especially in the age of hyper-saturated media, but the lore of Staten Island and the testimonies of the families and community members affected by these crimes helps to deepen the mystery surrounding Rand’s guilt or innocence, while at the same time revealing a lynch mob mentality in a society unwilling to admit its own culpability in creating a monster. In the end, the question is not whether Rand murdered these children because he felt they were better off dead than at the disposal of a cruel and destructive mental health system, or if a group of Satanists sacrificed them for some greater glory. The question is how and why we created these guilty monsters and scapegoats. How can we dump our trash and our human refuse on the Staten Islands of the world and still be surprised when out of the filth arise such demons?

Check out the film's website here.

Here's some more info about the Cropsey legend.

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978)

I was a little disappointed with the police procedural fixation of Whitley Strieber’s 1978 novel The Wolfen from the get-go, even when it was relatively clean and somewhat evocative of the urban landscape in the earlier chapters of the novel. The setting and time period, New York City in the 1970s, could play host to an awesome story of mass hysteria, urban decay, and perhaps hedonism, not to mention werewolves, the way Spike Lee manages in Summer of Sam, with a real life serial killer. I can't think of a novel, offhand, that achieves this sort of 70s paranoia and delirium, but I'm sure they're out there. It seemed that Strieber completely forgot about his city after the cops were killed in the auto pound in the first section of the book. We get a decent description of the desolation in the Bronx, and a few upper Manhattan scenes (the fountain and the museum) that are bland and generic. The love triangle bit was useless and made the two cops much less interesting. I would’ve liked to see a bit more about Dick, our main character’s husband. He seems like a misunderstood guy who has been chewed up by the system, though Strieber pulls the heartstrings a bit too heavily when he has Dick spend the extorted money on taking care of his sick father. Come on. I could imagine someone, someone who wears Druid garb at conventions, reading this novel as a defense of the Wolfen. They are nobler beasts than we. They only kill the sick, old and weak. They live in harmony with their ecosystem. That’s baloney and not supported by the text (though knowing a bit about Strieber’s wacko ideas, he may have been aiming in that direction).

Strieber also seemed a little proud of himself concerning the idea about vampires being normal humans who leach off of the Wolfen. He made the guy at the Natural History Museum a little too credulous. All it took to convince him of the existence of sapient wolf-beings was an old etching in a silly book.

There is a 1981 film starring Albert Finney very loosely based on this novel, and I’d definitely recommend the film over the book in this case.

You can learn a bit more about Strieber's latest obsessions here.