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Reviews

part two of two

The Beasts of Love

Drowned Wednesday

Live! From Planet Earth

The Traveling Tide

Leaving the Mickey

The Beasts of Love  :  Steven Utley

Wheatland Press, 2005
ISBN: 0-9720547-9-0
285 pages
RRP: US$19.95
Review by Russell B. Farr

If there are only two types of writers then the short-story specialist is none of them. Such writers walk the hardest road: any writer can make their name from a novel, but to make a name from 35 years of short stories, well there can only be one.

That name is Steven Utley.

Few writers have produced such a diverse range of stories as Utley. His first collection, Ghost Seas (published by Ticonderoga Publications in 1997) was a mixed bag of exquisite tales spread across a range of genres. Western, detective, historical, science fiction and Utley's one true love: dinosaurs.

The Beasts of Love, Utley's second collection, is a similarly varied and exquisite fare. Thirty-one stories in total, a decent amount for any writer and any collection, but in Utley's career this merely represents some of his work. None of these stories appeared among the fourteen stories in Ghost Seas, nor in his forthcoming collection Where or When (another fourteen stories). That's an impressive canon, to be able to produce three excellent collections of some 59 stories, without repeating, and at the same time leaving some of Utley's best work, the "Silurian Tales" themed stories, waiting for a publisher possessing both taste and insight.

There are only a couple of dinosaurs in The Beasts of Love as these stories deal mostly with the stronger emotions: love and hate. It is with these stories that Utley is at his best, weaving real characters into a range of unusual situations. The collection isn't all sf or horror: Utley knows about people, he knows what makes a story and genre be damned.

The Beasts of Love opens with Utley's exceptionally strong "The Country Doctor", one of those stories where any attempt to summarise the plot in a single sentence wouldn't do it justice without recourse to abuses of punctuation. Doug Riddle returns to the town of Gardner, home of his forefathers and soon to be submerged by the building of a new dam. A team of archaeologists are at work in the cemetery exhuming graves for burial elsewhere. In a Lovecraftian twist, Riddle finds out more than he anticipated about his ancestors and the mysterious town Doctor. Utley does this without throwing a thesaurus around, telling the story in a straightforward fashion through Riddle while providing some vivid imagery.

Not content to stick to a single theme in a story, "Leaves" is a first-contact ghost story. Utley fits a lot into these nine pages: love, a sense of loss, the small town experience, not to mention an alien landing and a ghost.

Utley knows about people, he knows what makes a story and genre be damned. In The Beasts of Love he successfully captures the rawest human emotions - and the humans who truly feel them - in these stories. And it works. Utley's stories bring an extra level of characterisation with them: the reader is confronted with the idea as well as the people affected.

The collection also features some of Utley's fabulous, more gonzo stories, including "Tom Sawyer's Sub-Orbital Escapade" (co-written with Lisa Tuttle), "Pan-Galactic Swingers" and "Little Whalers", the latter being a fictitious collaboration between Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville, Little Women meets Moby Dick. To each of these stories Utley (and Lisa Tuttle) brings an appreciation of the literature that goes beyond pastiche and reveals his keen eye for style. Utley knows his stuff.

The collection finishes with a tale that verges on the sublime, “Once More With Feeling”. Jack is a mathematician in his late forties, set in his ways, and happily married until he is haunted by his past. Utley takes the reader through Jack's torment, revealing its effect on his life and those closest to him. It is also a stylistic masterpiece, filled with minute, realistic detail and incredible characterisation. It is clever without trying to be, full of subtle writing. None of the living characters have surnames, they're Jack, Wanda, Eldean, regular people, while the ghost is “Jonesy”, Catherine Jones.

Wheatland Press has done a wonderful job in bringing this collection into the world and I raise a glass to its proprietors. It's a fine package, with a bizarrely impressive Max Ernst painting on the cover and a thoughtful introduction by Lisa Tuttle. In this world where worthwhile doesn't necessarily translate to bankable, an Utley collection is plenty of the former. In an ideal world where short stories are properly appreciated it would be mucho plenty of the latter, too. But there is something good happening in Wilsonville, Oregon.

There are half a dozen stories in this collection worth the cover price alone, and put them together and it's worth the Australian to US exchange rate and the wait for delivery. The Beasts of Love is a must for any serious aficionado of the short story. Utley is to emotion what Borges is to the metaphysical. Some stories are raw, others polished to an incredible sheen, but there isn't anything to match this collection on either side of the Pacific.

The Beasts of Love is available from Slowglass Books or Wheatland Press.

Drowned Wednesday  :  Garth Nix

Allen & Unwin, 2005
ISBN: 1-74114-441-8
368 pages
RRP: AU$14.95
Review by Liz Grzyb

The Keys of the Kingdom series is marketed as children's fantasy (and indeed, was nominated for an Aurealis Award in the Children's category), yet are good reading for everyone who likes a good fantasy/adventure story.

Arthur Penhaligon seems like a normal boy. He has asthma, he worries about his friends, and he's also Lord Arthur, Master of the Lower House and of the Far Reaches, Rightful Heir to the Kingdom. Apart from the many titles, Arthur is a realistic character. Both young and slightly older readers will sympathise with Arthur's prosaic responses to some of the fantastic circumstances he finds himself in.

While recovering from his previous adventures, Arthur is invited for lunch with Drowned Wednesday, the third of the Morrow Days who have possessed themselves of the Keys (thus the power) from the Architect and parts of her Will. In Mister Monday and Grim Tuesday, Arthur battled the preceding two Morrow Days to regain their parts of the Will and Keys.

Arthur is borne off with his hospital bed into the Border Sea, where he loses his friend Leaf and when he seeks refuge on a big red marker buoy, he is inadvertently marked as a thief. Once rescued by salvagers on the Moth, Arthur must try to find Leaf and have lunch with (and escape the ravening hunger of) Drowned Wednesday. This is all before persuading the Raised Rats to lend him their submarine to find the Will and save Leaf. In the meantime, Arthur meets some old friends, makes some new ones and almost becomes a rat!

The minor characters in Drowned Wednesday are quite straightforward. There is some suspicion towards the intentions of some of the individuals, but most can be taken simply at face value, so the reader can concentrate more on being swept away by the rollicking adventure story.

Drowned Wednesday is an easy read to while away a summer's afternoon. The story is good fun, and should certainly be on a few Christmas lists, children and adults alike!

Drowned Wednesday is available from Slowglass Books or Allen & Unwin.

Live! From Planet Earth  :  George Alec Effinger

Golden Gryphon, 2005
ISBN: 1-930846-32-0
363 pages
RRP: US$25.95
Review by Russell B. Farr

George Alec Effinger: Live! From Planet Earth collects 22 stories selected by writers who had the pleasure of knowing Effinger: Neal Barrett Jr, Brad Denton, Gardner Dozois, Neil Gaiman, Barbara Hambly, Howard Waldrop and others, making it a fine tribute.

The collection opens with a real corker. "The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" would have made an excellent episode of West Wing. The aliens have landed, a friendly bunch who don't have to be "back to work until a week from Monday". And the nhup, like all interplanetary beings, know stuff that we don't. Like which is the best human musical composition, and the prettiest flower on Earth. And clothes, décor, statesmen, novelists, movies, emotions, cars, everything. Everyone, from the President of the U.S. down to the average guy in the street, has nhup telling them what to do and how to do it. It's funny, imaginative and has a fantastic twist. As Michael Bishop says in the introduction, "Hollyhocks!"

"All the Last Wars at Once" is a powerful story about the deep-rooted human desire for war and conflict. The time has come for the war to end all wars, only the battle lines keep getting redrawn until the lines are meaningless. Effinger cuts through everything in this brutal yet thought-provoking tale.

Howard Waldrop calls "Two Sadnesses" a masterpiece, and that's as good a description as any. It's The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh updated, in perfect voice: high calibre writing all-round.

All the stories in this collection are masterpieces. Some are in Effinger's voice, while in others, the O. Niemand stories especially, Effinger immaculately captures the voices of other writers. The stories in his own voice are incredibly strong, and in "One" and "Everything but Honor" Effinger wasn't afraid to take on unconventional points of view to tell the story. In the former he suggests that humans are alone in the universe, while in the latter is an alternate history time travel story told backwards.

"Housebound" is a special story that deserves to be read by all. It isn't SF in any sense, yet this story about agoraphobia describes thought patterns and behaviours that some readers will find completely alien, even though they are a reality for a proportion of the population.

The collection is a contender for collection of the year, excellently packaged with a wonderfully star-studded John Picacio cover full of colour and pizzazz. Golden Gryphon are consistently producing elegant, well made books that belong on two thousand bookshelves across the world. Much kudos to this independent publisher.

Effinger was the creator of numerous memorable stories filled with the most amazing characters: both created by other writers and of his own devising. George Alec Effinger: Live! From Planet Earth is both a fitting tribute to a fine writer and an excellent introduction to any reader who is yet to read any of Effinger's work.

When George Alec Effinger died he left behind a less than ideal life and a bibliography without parallel.

George Alec Effinger: Live! From Planet Earth is available from Slowglass Books or Golden Gryphon.

The Traveling Tide  :  Rosaleen Love

Aqueduct Press, 2005
ISBN: 0-9746559-9-6
100 pages
RRP: US$9.00
Review by Russell B. Farr

This is a short review of a short collection of short fiction.

Rosaleen Love is an exceptionally talented writer of very unusual stories. Her two previous collections, The Total Devotion Machine (Women's Press, 1989) and Evolution Annie and Other Stories (Women's Press, 1993) were mind-blowing, eclectic and captured a writer with a unique voice and a sharp eye.

The Traveling Tide is a chapbook from Aqueduct Press's Conversation Series, celebrating "the speculations and visions of the grand conversation of feminist sf". To your humble reviewer, an under-educated male, that sounds like a pile of academic twaddle; and the avid reader and fan of Love's work, sadly unsated with the chapbook I held in my hands.

The all-too-brief collection opens with "Alexander's Feats", my favourite story of the collection. Love goes behind the tales of Alexander the Great and presents the story from the point of view of Roxanne, his long-suffering wife. The result is classic Love, an uncanny, offbeat read that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Love's voice is also strong with "Once Giants Roamed the Earth", a modern day story of giant monsters and Indigenous legends wrapped in a Gaia tale. It is a lesson to all short-fiction writers on economic storytelling as there's barely a word out of place in this effective tale.

The Traveling Tide contains seven varied pieces of Love's recent work, including two original works, and may indeed be a celebratory example of feminist sf. To this reviewer it's small beer for a writer whose uncollected work deserves a larger collection. To this reviewer, that would be a grand conversation.

The Traveling Tide is available from Slowglass Books or Aqueduct Press.

Leaving the Mickey  :  Patricia Irvine

Wakefield Press, 2004
ISBN: 1-86254-635-5
80 pages
RRP: AU$19.95
Review by Jacinta Rosielle

I thoroughly enjoyed the last poem in Patricia Irvine's Leaving The Mickey, and not simply because it was the final page of the book. In a collection of predominantly light-hearted poems, “Organ Voluntary” was a nice surprise. Inspired by William Carlos Williams' “This Is Just To Say”, Irvine transforms it into a rationale for cannibalism which begins with “I have eaten/the hearts and lungs/that were in/the esky” and then ridicules doctors who smoke and expect medicine to save them. Twisted, bitter, social commentary.

However, in “Mummy”, inspired by Sylvia Plath's heart-ripping “Daddy”, she uses trite, schoolyard rhymes to describe an alcoholic mother, like “You've no heart and no brain / And no blood in your veins” and “You bitch in your pearls and twinset. Oh! / You locked me away in a ghetto”. It's a far cry from Plath's “Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You - / Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through”. Irvine's poem sounds like an exercise in imitation that unfortunately did not progress to anything more elevated.

Then there are the numerous, but thankfully brief, poems describing various birds, animals and other creatures in “Notes For A Field Guide”. Let me illustrate with an excerpt: “Caterpillar” (in its entirety). “Fat, hairy concertina, / I tried to make you face the music / but you wriggled out of it.” Cute idea, but not exactly satisfying, which could be said about many of the poems in this book.

There are, however, some interesting poems in the book's first section, “Black Box”, such as: “Catholic Girls' Skipping Song 1959”; “Mammogram”; and “Crumpled Tissue”, about a widow coming to terms with her recently deceased husband's death as she unpacks his suitcase. The section's title piece, about the Catholic ritual of confession, charms from the beginning: “Father O'Who in the Tardis / Slid the panel back – a doggy door for sin / that wriggled through the grille / of the black box vice recorder”. It then continues to demonstrate Irvine's skill in finding unusual metaphors to illustrate her comedic view of the world.

Patricia Irvine's appeal lies mostly in her humour, which I guess isn't so appealing for a fan of Plath and Ginsberg. But if you like your poetry light and easy, this collection might be for you. For me, the majority of the poems in Leaving The Mickey are simple, technically adequate, but without illuminating observations or insights.

Leaving the Mickey is available from Wakefield Press

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