Sarah Monette's Blog, page 17

UBC: Robert Kolker, Lost Girls

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a fascinating, disturbing, terrifying, and deeply sad book. It's a study of the deaths of five women, all of them "escorts" who advertised on Craigslist, four of the five (if not all five) murdered by the same person. Kolker isn't so much interested in the investigation as he is in the biographies of the victims and the stories of the people who survive them. He's compassionately non-judgmental (I think the only person I could actually tell Kolker didn't like was Shannan Gilbert's last john) and what he ends up writing is a study of modern American poverty as much as it is anything else. These women didn't resort to prostitution because they were corrupt or lazy; they resorted to prostitution because they needed the money. The money they could make at "honest" jobs (and those "honest" jobs being hard to come by) just looks ridiculous next to the money they could make as escorts. Kolker comments at the end, "The demand for commercial sex will never go away" (381), and the truth of that is something America has been failing to cope with for a very long time. In most ways, the world that these women lived and died in is very different from the world that Helen Jewett lived and died in (The Murder of Helen Jewett), but in some ways it is horribly the same. And if you compare the hardship--and outright lethal danger--of trying to make a living as an escort via Craigslist with the relative safety and security of the women at Mustang Ranch (Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women) it kind of makes you despair of a society that would rather blame the prostitute than admit any shred of responsibility on the part of the john. Would rather condone murder than give women (and men) a chance to do this job safely and with dignity.

Kolker doesn't try to impose a narrative on something that is intrinsically narativeless. There's only parts of a story here, parts that can't be lined up with each other. Lost Girls is a gentle ironizing of books like Someone's Daughter, as Kolker records the alliance formed by the mothers and sisters and friends of the murdered women, and then records the way that alliance falls apart under the pressure of the horrible anti-closure of the case. The arc of redemptive community, of the survivors coming together to create a family, ends with a woman unwilling to talk to the accidentally encountered father of her murdered sister's son because she's afraid of looking like a stalker. There is nothing, Kolker suggests, that is redeemable about these crimes, only destruction.






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Interview with New Books in Science Fiction & WFC

There's a podcast interview with me here.

Did not win World Fantasy Award, meaning that, at the end of this awards season, my batting average is .250 (1 in 4). Which is not great for a ballplayer, but still above the Mendoza Line.

Thank you to everybody at WFC who took the time to tell me how much you liked The Goblin Emperor. I appreciate it deeply.

Underfoot Cat is ingenious, but not always very plausible.

ME: Underfoot Cat, what have you done with my glasses?
UNDERFOOT CAT: What makes you think it was me?
ME: Well, there's only the three of us in the house, and it wasn't me and it wasn't Catzilla.
U.C.: How do you know there's only three of us in the house? You could have gremlins! Poltergeists! A secret cat!
ME: No, I couldn't. Besides which, you were sitting beside them on the counter just before they disappeared.
U.C.: That's nothing but circum . . . circumstitial . . .
ME: Circumstantial.
U.C.: I knew that. Circumstantial evidence. Doesn't prove a thing.
ME: And yet, here are my glasses, under the bathtub, and there are you, the only creature in the house who could have knocked them there.
U.C.: Um. I plead the Fifth?
ME: If you have Constitutional rights--which you don't--that's not one of them.
U.C.: All right! All right! I confess! I did it! I did it! I repent!
ME: . . . Your repentance looks an awful lot like rolling around on the floor and picking a fight with the bath mat. And losing.
U.C.: 'S not my fault if interpretive dance is the best of my limited options for communication.
ME: Yes, let's both just pretend that's what that was. Try to remember that my glasses are not a toy.
U.C.: You say that about everything. [exits grumbling] It was all the Secret Cat's fault anyway.
ME: [after him] We don't have a secret cat!

A dialogue at 5:30 in the morning

ME: Underfoot Cat, why are you in the bathtub?
UNDERFOOT CAT: Because.
ME: What are you doing?
U.C.: Stuff.
ME: It looks to me like you're chasing your own tail.
U.C.: . . . Maybe.
ME: You realize this is a misappropriation of the bathtub.
U.C.: I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.
ME: That's you purring.
U.C.: Same difference.
ME: I could turn the water on.
U.C.: You wouldn't.
ME: . . . Maybe.

And again ...

[tremendous, drawn-out, and clearly disastrous clattering noise]
Me: Oh my god, cat, what did you do?
Underfoot Cat: [looking innocent, if somewhat alarmed] I have no idea what you're talking about.
[I search the house with great and dour suspicion.]
Me: No, seriously, cat, WHAT DID YOU DO?
Underfoot Cat: This lack of trust wounds me greatly. Just for that, I'm not sayin'.
Me: AUGH!

A dialogue between cat and biped

Underfoot Cat: What are you doing?
Me: Taking a shower.
Underfoot Cat: Why?
Me: Personal hygiene.
Underfoot Cat: Wtf? Why don't you just use your tongue?
Me: Because reasons.
Underfoot Cat: ... You're not putting me on, are you?
Me: [getting out] No, really, this is how we--
Underfoot Cat: OH MY GOD YOU'RE MADE OF WET

IF YOU LIKE THE GOBLIN EMPEROR

I got email from a reader the other day, wondering about other books like The Goblin Emperor (what matociquala has dubbed "committeepunk"). I'm kind of terrible at that game, so I did what any sensible person would do. I asked Twitter.

(And thank you very kindly to everyone who responded.)

Someone pointed out that if you merely want more books by me, there are several of them: Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis, The Bone Key, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home, plus collaborations with matociquala , A Companion to Wolves, The Tempering of Men, An Apprentice to Elves (forthcoming in October). But there were also many suggestions of other books to try.

It occurred to me subsequently that other people might also like to have those suggestions, so I'm compiling that Twitter list here--also everyone should feel free to add more suggestions in the comments!

(N.b., just because a book is on the list does not mean I personally endorse it as being like The Goblin Emperor in whatever capacity a reader might be looking for. Many of these books I have not read. Some of them I haven't even heard of.)

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner
Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown
Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurtz, Daughter of the Empire
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
M. C. A. Hogarth, Thief of Songs
N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword
Pat Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief

Again, please feel free to play along at home and suggest more books!

UBC: M. J. Trow, The Thames Torso Murders

The Thames Torso Murders by M.J. Trow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars




I'm of two minds about M. J. Trow. On the one hand, he is clearly extremely intelligent and his analytical abilities are superb--as is the clear, sharp way he swings the sword of common sense in discussions of the possible identity of Jack the Ripper. On the other, he is sloppy as a researcher and he has a sort of P. T. Barnum sense of showmanship that for me does nothing but get in the way.

After the disorganization caused by Trow sacrificing clarity for a good hook, the worst problem I had with this book was that, although the various locations along the Thames are critical to the narrative, there is no map. For someone unfamiliar with London, this makes the book extremely difficult to follow.

With that said:

This is one of only two books devoted to the Thames Torso Murders. (The other is The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian Britain (2002), which apparently is committed to the ridiculous thesis that the Thames Torso Murderer and Jack the Ripper were the same person.) It is made unnecessarily confusing by Trow's choice to start in 1887, work his way up to 1889, and then go back to 1873, 1874, and 1884. This is obviously a strategy deployed to make the most of the Jack the Ripper connection, and it's unnecessary, especially since Trow is very clear on the fact that the Thames Torso Murderer was not Jack the Ripper: these were men with very different modi operandi at basically every point you can think of, and again I appreciate Trow's basic common sense in refusing to be swayed by the chronological coincidence.

The Thames Torso Murderer murdered and dismembered seven (eight?) women between 1873 and 1889. Of those seven, only the last of them, Elizabeth Jackson, was ever identified. Trow describes the progress of the crimes and the fruitless investigations, and continues throughout to put the Thames Torso Murderer in his proper context in late Victorian London, as for example: "The pickle jar found on the 13th [June] had no connection with the Thames mystery. It did contain the body of a foetus, but in [Dr] Kempster's opinion, had not come from the murdered woman" (64). Trow has an excellent later chapter entitled "Men Behaviing Madly," in which he discusses all the other potentially homicidal lunatics wandering around London in this same general time period--men whom we know about because they have been unearthed as possible Jacks the Ripper: Aaron Davis Cohen, Thomas Hayne Cutbush, Oswald Puckeridge, Jacob Isenschmid, Aaron Kosminski, Charles Ludwig, William Henry Pigott, John Sanders, G Wentworth Bell Smith, James Kelly, Thomas Neill Cream (actually a serial killer), George Chapman (actually a serial killer). The Thames Torso Murderer is terrifying--no idea who he is, no idea where he killed his victims or where he actually dropped their bodies into the river, no idea how he chose them or lured them in--but so is the world in which he lived. The foreground doesn't exist without the background.

(Victorian London sometimes seems like it must be made up, except that if you tried to put it in a novel, no one would believe you.)

Rather like Jack the Ripper, the Thames Torso Murderer does not inhabit a story with a beginning, middle, and end. We begin in medias res (with Martha Tabram or Polly Nichols, depending on your theory about the Ripper, and with the lady whose body--including the skin of her face and scalp--was found starting at Battersea on 5 September 1873) we careen or meander from murder to murder, and we don't have an ending so much as a trail going cold after Mary Jane Kelly (or Alice Mackenzie or Rose Mylett or Frances Coles, again depending on your theory) and after Elizabeth Jackson and her 7-month foetus. We know, and can deduce, even less about the Thames Torso Murderer than we can about Jack. I like Trow's theory that the Thames Torso Murderer was a cat's-meat man--and Trow includes a description of the horrifying end waiting for the some 26,000 a year of London's cab horses that were sent to the slaughterhouse (hello, Black Beauty)--but even there, even if that's true, there were hundreds of cat's-meat men in London (per Mayhew), and we don't know anything more about them than that.

As with Jack, there aren't any answers, just the evidence the murderer chose to leave behind.



IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in the Thames Torso Murders, I have to recommend this book because it's one of only two, and it's not trying to make the Thames Torso Murders fit into an artificial pattern (such as suggesting that this murderer and Jack the Ripper are the same person).

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in Victorian London more generally--and have a very strong stomach--I also recommend it, because of the superb job Trow does in evoking the context of these murders. It's a view of London you aren't otherwise going to get.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in the history of serial killers, I recommend this book, if for no other reason than that of view of the Thames Torso Murderer has been so obstructed by Rippermania that we barely even know he exists.

OTHERWISE, this book is probably not for you.



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The 2015 Hugo Awards

Congratulations to the 2015 Hugo winners!

I'm very pleased that Liu Cixin and Ken Liu won. All of the fiction awards that were given this year went to translated works (that is, Short Story & Novel, the only two which did not end up No Award), which has never happened before and which I think is a wonderful thing. So if I'm gonna lose, I'm glad I lost to The Three-Body Problem.

And extra special congratulations to Wes Chu, this year's Campbell winner!

My Sasquan schedule

So, yeah, I'm gonna be at Sasquan. If you want to find me, here are the places and times to look.

Standard disclaimer: I am both very shy and very near-sighted.

***

Autographing - Katherine Addison, Alma Alexander, Elizabeth Bear, Marissa Meyer, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Stanley Schmidt, Catherynne M. Valente
Friday 14:00 - 14:45, Hall B (CC)

Reading - Katherine Addison
Friday 16:00 - 16:30, 304 (CC)

Fantasy and Supernatural Noir
Saturday 12:00 - 12:45, Bays 111C (CC)
Dark speculative and (frequently) dark detective works are best-sellers these days. Our panel talks about early supernatural noir and where it's headed now.

Diana Pharaoh Francis, Richard Kadrey, Katherine Addison, John Pitts

Demigods, Chosen Ones & Rightful Heirs: Can Progress, Merit & Citizens Ever Matter in Fantasy?
Saturday 16:00 - 16:45, 300A (CC)
Science fiction often centers around meritocracies (or at least "knowledgetocracies") but fantasy? Not so much. Or, as Dennis famously said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "…Strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony." Has fantasy ever overcome this classic trope? Can it?

Darlene Marshall (M), Anaea Lay, Mary Soon Lee, Setsu Uzume, Katherine Addison

And then the Hugos. Eep.