And Now for Something Completely Different

 

Two books from opposite ends of the spectrum of the fabulous, the fantastic, the radically silly and the absurd: 

SANDMAN SLIM by Richard Kadrey is dirty, disgusting, vulgar, violent, poisonously testosterone-driven, so politically incorrect it ought to be prosecuted, and generally all-round offensively in your face.  Do not be sniggering over this one during your coffee break if the boss likes to cruise round and peer over people's shoulders.  Don't read it even in the guest room at sweet little Great Aunt Gladys':  I think the miasma that wafts off the pages when you open it would slink under the door, dissipate through the rest of the house, and make her cry.  I loved it.  It's amazing.  I think I may have thrown up a few times but what the hell.

            Hell.  Exactly.  Our . . . er . . . hero isn't quite the word, and protagonist sounds like something you could discuss in English lit class.  I don't think so.  Narrator.  Okay.  We're good with narrator.  Our narrator wakes up in a pile of burning garbage:  'My jeans are a little crispy, but the heavy leather of my jacket protected my back.  I'm not really burned, just singed and in shock.  I probably hadn't been on the fire too long. . . . Otherwise I might have crawled back into this world and ended up a charcoal briquette in my first five minutes home.  And wouldn't those black-hearted bastards down under have laughed . . .'  Our narrator has been in hell for the last eleven years, working for Azazel, Lucifer's second-favourite general.  'They always had me fighting weird animals.  I didn't know for a long time that it was another Hellion insult.  They made me a bestiari.  It was a Roman thing—a fun way to use their dumbest, gimpiest, most cross-eyed fighters.  Bestiari weren't good enough to fight people, so they fought animals.  Why waste a human gladiator on someone who had just as good a chance of cutting off his own leg as stabbing his opponent?  Plus, it was fun watching bears eat retards. . . . except for Lucifer and his generals, most of Hell's troops make the Beverly Hillbillies look like the Algonquin Round Table.'

            You'll know pretty soon if Kadrey and his narrator are for you or not.  You should already be getting the flavour.  '. . .  [Hollywood] Boulevard is only ever real at night when it's both bright and black and there are promises hidden in every shadow.  It's like it was designed and built specifically for vampires.  For all I know, it was.

            'Yes, there are vampires.  Try to keep up.'

            Our narrator—James Stark, but you should lose the James if you want to go on living—was sent Downtown by his old Circle:  six magicians whose egos got bent out of shape by Stark's anarchic brilliance.  So the chief guy, with help from some of the others, posted him—live—to hell.  He was supposed to stay there.  He wasn't supposed to survive—or come back and start hunting them down for a little payback.

            You've been warned.  But you're missing a treat if you decide to stick with Milton and Dante.  Even the acknowledgements are worth reading:   'Thanks especially to Tom Waits for letting me carjack some of his beautiful lyrics.  If I die first, you can have my bones for a xylophone.'  The nearest thing to a heroine is a particularly icky monster trying to go straight with help from a doc equipped with a kind of monster methadone, but she reverts to type when Stark needs some help in the serious rending and maiming line.  In the midst of battle she is described thus:  '[She] isn't using the guns any more.  She's back to teeth and claws, a meat grinder in tight jeans and Chuck Taylors.'  Italics mine.  But I wish to point out that the All Stars reference doesn't happen till page 325.  I was well and truly hooked long before.

Then there's SORCERY AND CECELIA OR THE ENCHANTED CHOCOLATE POT by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.   How did I frelling miss this?  It came out in 1998, for pity's sake.  Have I been living in a vegetable bin all that time?  Slightly in my defense it has done some wandering in and out of print, because I've tried to buy it at least twice while I was staying in the houses of friends who expressed shock and horror that I didn't know it, but when I was hustled down to the local bookstore to put this sad state of affairs to rights, it not only wasn't on the shelves, it wasn't available.  In at least one case I remember the bookseller getting fairly expressive about this culpable error on the part of its publishers.  But there are lots and lots and lots of books in this world that need reading, and I kept forgetting about it.  I remember trying to order it at least once on my own imperative and was informed that it was just up there on the screen, that didn't mean I could buy a copy and take it home with me.  I'm so naïve.

            And then Amazon recommended it to me.  Amazon, you little freller.  I usually do pass a casual eye over what it thinks it might sell me when I'm in there looking something else up* but I rarely pursue any of their suggestions;  I can come up with a list of 1,000,000,000 must-reads for the year without any help.  But one day, from out of the pixelline mists, there . . . there was SORCERY AND CECELIA.  I ordered it on the spot, clinging, in an interweb, virtual sort of way, to the material details, like Janet hanging on to Tam Lin while the Faerie Queen turns him to a snake and a burning brand . . . and this time I succeeded. 

            Most of you have already read it, I'm sure.

            It's Georgette Heyer with magic.

            Any of you who haven't read it are now clicking away from this page to your favourite book-ordering site, right?  Good plan.  Excellent plan.  SORCERY is totally charming.  It's darling.  It's chocolate without the calories.  It's the kind of floaty frivolous fluff that makes you feel clever and refreshed and inspired at the end of the last chapter rather than embarrassed and furtive that you've just wasted several hours of your life on it.  I will doubtless read it again. 

            And just in case you need any further encouragement—you don't need to hear about the plot, do you?  Kate and Cecelia—Cecy—are cousins.  Kate's in London having her Season, and Cecy is at home in the country:  'It is dreadfully flat here since you have been gone, and it only makes it worse to imagine all the things I shall be missing.  I wish Aunt Elizabeth were not so set against my having a Season this year.  She is still annoyed about the incident with the goat, and says that to let the pair of us loose on London would ruin us both for good . . . Not that we are without amusement in Essex . . . Aunt Elizabeth and I called at the vicarage yesterday and spent a stimulating afternoon listening to the Reverend Fitzwilliam discoursing on the Vanities of Society and the Emptiness of Worldly Pleasures.  Aunt Elizabeth hung on every word, and we are to return and take tea on Thursday.  I am determined to have the headache Thursday, if I have to hit myself with a rock to do it. . . .'

            But if you needed any further encouragement than 'Georgette Heyer with magic', let me offer you this paragraph, which still makes me giggle with delight:  'For gossip, I know I can trust the fertility of your imagination to produce suitable material to amuse Aunt Elizabeth.  To leaven your accounts, you may wish to use a few of the following details:  The notorious poetess Lady Caroline Lamb continues to scandalise society with her exploits.  Lord Byron continues to scandalize Lady Caro with his uninhibited attempts to rekindle their affair.  (Forgive me if my blunt language puts you to the blush.  That's what gossip is for.)  Young men of temperament . . . continue to dress as Lord Byron does, in the hope that, since Lady Caro modelled her famous Corsair on her friend in happier times, stylish dishevelment will give them Corsair-like appeal to young ladies of temperament.'

            Hee hee hee hee hee.**         

* * *

 *This came up on Twitter a day or two go:  yes, Amazon regularly recommends Robin McKinley to me.  But then it knows me as Robin McKinley Dickinson.

** Okay, okay, anyone who isn't an old reprobate English lit major:  in this world, Byron was the famous poet, and Lady Caroline Lamb the madwoman who refused to believe their affair was over and got up to all kinds of wild—and pathetic—tricks to try to re-interest him.  I've always found it a depressing as well as a sordid story.  I love Byron's poetry, but he was not a nice man.  And poor Caro was nuts.