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John James #0.5 - The Maid on the Shore
Dark Mondays
Kage Baker, celebrated creator of the Company novels and the standout collection Mother Aegypt, now brings together pirates, primates, eldritch horrors, maritime ghosts, and much more in Dark Mondays.
This captivating new collection of fantastic short fiction is sure to cement her reputation as one of the most original storytellers working in the fantasy and speculative fiction genres today.
Whether spinning tales of the mysterious young woman and the dreadful pirate captain Henry Morgan in the original novella “The Maid on the Shore,”or the tiny California beach community assaulted by Lovecraftian terrors in “Calamari Curls,” or the girl menaced by a haunting photograph and a trio of aspiring vampires at the heart of “Portrait, With Flames,” Kage Baker distinguishes herself throughout Dark Mondays as a storyteller extraordinaire, crafting intricately woven plots, compelling characters, and captivating settings filled with convincing detail.
As likely to shock and surprise as it is to fill you with a sense of weird wonder and delight, Dark Mondays will entrance you with its inventive prose, astound you with its action, and seduce you with its style.
Dark Mondays features five never-before-published stories, including the forty-one-thousand-word pirate novel, “The Maid on the Shore,” which chronicles the lesser known aspects of Captain Henry Morgan’s infamous sacking of Panama City.
This captivating new collection of fantastic short fiction is sure to cement her reputation as one of the most original storytellers working in the fantasy and speculative fiction genres today.
Whether spinning tales of the mysterious young woman and the dreadful pirate captain Henry Morgan in the original novella “The Maid on the Shore,”or the tiny California beach community assaulted by Lovecraftian terrors in “Calamari Curls,” or the girl menaced by a haunting photograph and a trio of aspiring vampires at the heart of “Portrait, With Flames,” Kage Baker distinguishes herself throughout Dark Mondays as a storyteller extraordinaire, crafting intricately woven plots, compelling characters, and captivating settings filled with convincing detail.
As likely to shock and surprise as it is to fill you with a sense of weird wonder and delight, Dark Mondays will entrance you with its inventive prose, astound you with its action, and seduce you with its style.
Dark Mondays features five never-before-published stories, including the forty-one-thousand-word pirate novel, “The Maid on the Shore,” which chronicles the lesser known aspects of Captain Henry Morgan’s infamous sacking of Panama City.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published June 29, 2006
About the author
Kage Baker
178 books359 followersBorn June 10, 1952, in Hollywood, California, and grew up there and in Pismo Beach, present home. Spent 12 years in assorted navy blue uniforms obtaining a good parochial school education and numerous emotional scars. Rapier wit developed as defense mechanism to deflect rage of larger and more powerful children who took offense at abrasive, condescending and arrogant personality in a sickly eight-year-old. Family: 2 parents, 6 siblings, 4 nieces, 2 nephews. Husbands: 0. Children: 0.
Prior occupations: graphic artist and mural painter, several lower clerical positions which could in no way be construed as a career, and (over a period of years for the Living History Centre) playwright, bit player, director, teacher of Elizabethan English for the stage, stage manager and educational program assistant coordinator. Presently reengaged in the above-listed capacities for the LHC's triumphant reincarnation, AS YOU LIKE IT PRODUCTIONS.
20 years of total immersion research in Elizabethan as well as other historical periods has paid off handsomely in a working knowledge of period speech and details.
In spare time (ha) reads: any old sea stories by Marryat, the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien, the Hornblower books, ANYTHING by Robert Louis Stevenson, Raymond Chandler, Thorne Smith, Herman Melville (except Pierre, or the Ambiguities, which stinks) Somerset Maugham, George MacDonald Frasier.
Now happily settled in beautiful Pismo Beach, Clam Capital of the World, in charming seaside flat which is unfortunately not haunted by ghost of dashing sea captain. Avid gardener, birdwatcher, spinster aunt and Jethro Tull fan.
http://www.sfwa.org/2010/01/rip-kage-...
Prior occupations: graphic artist and mural painter, several lower clerical positions which could in no way be construed as a career, and (over a period of years for the Living History Centre) playwright, bit player, director, teacher of Elizabethan English for the stage, stage manager and educational program assistant coordinator. Presently reengaged in the above-listed capacities for the LHC's triumphant reincarnation, AS YOU LIKE IT PRODUCTIONS.
20 years of total immersion research in Elizabethan as well as other historical periods has paid off handsomely in a working knowledge of period speech and details.
In spare time (ha) reads: any old sea stories by Marryat, the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien, the Hornblower books, ANYTHING by Robert Louis Stevenson, Raymond Chandler, Thorne Smith, Herman Melville (except Pierre, or the Ambiguities, which stinks) Somerset Maugham, George MacDonald Frasier.
Now happily settled in beautiful Pismo Beach, Clam Capital of the World, in charming seaside flat which is unfortunately not haunted by ghost of dashing sea captain. Avid gardener, birdwatcher, spinster aunt and Jethro Tull fan.
http://www.sfwa.org/2010/01/rip-kage-...
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 29, 2011
A collection of short stories.
In "Two Old Women", a woman summons her long-dead husband and traps his ghost in her home. He lives soundless yet peacefully in her home, eating her carefully prepared meals and doing household chores. But the sea is displeased at being cheated of its rightful prey, and takes its revenge. The sensory details are dense and fantastic here, the language a wonderful mix of otherworldly and earthy.
Can't say I really liked "Portrait, With Flames," in which a teenager tries to reinvent herself but ends up catching the eye of some sort of flaming magical creature. I didn't get what happened in the end--
"Monkey Day" rubbed me the wrong way. It sets a saintly old priest, who has a benevolent yet humble smile for everyone, against a humorless spinster atheist teacher. In the middle is an imaginative little boy fascinated by monkeys. And of course, it ends with the teacher being wrong, narrow minded and a terrible educator.
"Calamari Curls" is one of those Cthulhu stories that every sf/f writer writes at some point, for no reason that I can discern. The tone of the tale is inconsistent--it starts out like the detailed story of the owner of a little bistro being outmaneuvered by a new restaurant, then turns into classic Cthulhu horror, and then is humor for the last few pages? I don't get it.
"Katherine's Story" is the star of the book, to my mind. Katherine is raised on pretentions and hopes, then marries as quickly as possible to escape her mother's overbearing influence. The man, and the marriage, aren't what she'd hoped for, and she finds herself living uncomfortably with her in-laws in a town without books or music. And then her child is born with spastic paralysis, and Katherine is the only one who refuses to institutionalize her. In only 15 pages, Baker draws Katherine into a fully-fledged woman whose mind I felt I knew intimately.
In "Oh, False Young Man!" a spurned woman spends years becoming the foremost automaton expert, in order to trick her erstwhile lover into believing her steampunky robot is their bastard child.
"So This Guy Walks Into a Lighthouse" isn't much of a story. Well written, but the story and characters are a bit too wacky for my taste.
"Silent Leonard" is great fun. What if Leonardo da Vinci had an accident that destroyed his left arm and left him dependent on an ambitious, none too scrupulous assistant? He might have built war machines and changed the fate of kings, that's what might have happened! Good amount of humor, nice twists on history as we know it.
"The Maid on the Shore" is a novella--100 pages--but I don't know why it exists. The tale itself is fine: a young man joins up with privateers and fights under Harry Morgan in the Caribbean. Morgan's daughter fights beside them, sometimes seeming more like a phoenix of vengeance than a girl. It's well told, I just didn't connect with it. I didn't care if they succeeded in taking the fort and getting gold; I just didn't give a damn about the main character. He was well written, but somehow just not...a character I had any feelings about.
Baker was a great writer, but I don't always appreciate the ideas and characters she liked to play with. Still, I'm glad I read this.
In "Two Old Women", a woman summons her long-dead husband and traps his ghost in her home. He lives soundless yet peacefully in her home, eating her carefully prepared meals and doing household chores. But the sea is displeased at being cheated of its rightful prey, and takes its revenge. The sensory details are dense and fantastic here, the language a wonderful mix of otherworldly and earthy.
Can't say I really liked "Portrait, With Flames," in which a teenager tries to reinvent herself but ends up catching the eye of some sort of flaming magical creature. I didn't get what happened in the end--
"Monkey Day" rubbed me the wrong way. It sets a saintly old priest, who has a benevolent yet humble smile for everyone, against a humorless spinster atheist teacher. In the middle is an imaginative little boy fascinated by monkeys. And of course, it ends with the teacher being wrong, narrow minded and a terrible educator.
"Calamari Curls" is one of those Cthulhu stories that every sf/f writer writes at some point, for no reason that I can discern. The tone of the tale is inconsistent--it starts out like the detailed story of the owner of a little bistro being outmaneuvered by a new restaurant, then turns into classic Cthulhu horror, and then is humor for the last few pages? I don't get it.
"Katherine's Story" is the star of the book, to my mind. Katherine is raised on pretentions and hopes, then marries as quickly as possible to escape her mother's overbearing influence. The man, and the marriage, aren't what she'd hoped for, and she finds herself living uncomfortably with her in-laws in a town without books or music. And then her child is born with spastic paralysis, and Katherine is the only one who refuses to institutionalize her. In only 15 pages, Baker draws Katherine into a fully-fledged woman whose mind I felt I knew intimately.
In "Oh, False Young Man!" a spurned woman spends years becoming the foremost automaton expert, in order to trick her erstwhile lover into believing her steampunky robot is their bastard child.
"So This Guy Walks Into a Lighthouse" isn't much of a story. Well written, but the story and characters are a bit too wacky for my taste.
"Silent Leonard" is great fun. What if Leonardo da Vinci had an accident that destroyed his left arm and left him dependent on an ambitious, none too scrupulous assistant? He might have built war machines and changed the fate of kings, that's what might have happened! Good amount of humor, nice twists on history as we know it.
"The Maid on the Shore" is a novella--100 pages--but I don't know why it exists. The tale itself is fine: a young man joins up with privateers and fights under Harry Morgan in the Caribbean. Morgan's daughter fights beside them, sometimes seeming more like a phoenix of vengeance than a girl. It's well told, I just didn't connect with it. I didn't care if they succeeded in taking the fort and getting gold; I just didn't give a damn about the main character. He was well written, but somehow just not...a character I had any feelings about.
Baker was a great writer, but I don't always appreciate the ideas and characters she liked to play with. Still, I'm glad I read this.
December 31, 2010
Kage Baker died too young.
July 14, 2014
eh; she really pissed me off when she kept referring to the trans woman as "he"
April 12, 2008
this was the first Kage Baker short story collection that wasn't completely amazing in every way. She used the same trope in too many of them, her newer writing style didn't bring us close enough to the main characters, and her pacing just seemed off. The final novella took way too long to actually get started and spent too much time recounting the history of its setting, which was not really necessary to the actual plot.
July 31, 2018
I wrote this with Kage Baker, who sadly died a number of years later. She used my ideas for the cover design.
July 13, 2021
You feel as if you are actually part of the story, absolutely awesome book, which I found very hard to put down.
September 3, 2007
Short stories, some of them funny, and all cyborg free. The last one is very long, bloody and somewhat piratey. (September 03, 2006)
October 14, 2007
I love Kage Baker, but this isn't my favorite book of short stories by her. That said, it's a hell of lot better than a lot of other stuff. Dark and melancholy.
February 8, 2015
"Calamari Curls" read to Lisa 7/25/2014 from The Best of Kage Baker
July 15, 2010
I don't think I was surprised by any of the stories, but they were a good read all the same and kept me entertained on the train. That's about all I can say for the book.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews