Canavan’s Comments (group member since May 15, 2018)

Canavan’s comments from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.

Lena said: I have read a good celluloid themed horror short, The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene).

You might be interested in Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles , another Ellen Datlow anthology. I’m slowly making my through the contents and can report that it is a solid, if not spectacular, collection. My favorite story thus far is “Scream Queen” by Nathan Ballingrud.

Lena said: And now I also want to read that Cronenberg tribute, well less so after seeing the cover. Cover art is so important yet I often see books shooting themselves in the foot.

The cover art for that book is by Michael Bukowski. I’m not crazy about it myself. It looks like a mediocre imitation of Gahan Wilson.

“They Are Us (1964): An Oral History”, Jack Lothian

(view spoiler)[I will follow in Lena’s footsteps by noting that this is the second story I have read by Mr. Lothian. The other, probably not coincidentally, was also an oral history of a fictional film: That story was “Elk: An Oral History of an Abandoned Film (1987)”, which appeared in a 2019 anthology edited by Sam Richard and Brendan Vidito, The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute to David Cronenberg. I liked “Elk”. I also liked “All of Us”, perhaps because it presses a number of my literary “buttons”. If written well, I tend to enjoy epistolary works; I’m also fond of works that feature evil or weird works of art. And I’m also often intrigued by literary doppelgängers. (This story originally appeared in Twice-Told: A Collection of Doubles, edited by C. M. Muller.) This tale features all three of those elements! The story Lothian tells isn’t perhaps terribly original, but it’s fairly well told in a kind of straightforward style that leaves just enough unexplained, thereby providing the reader with a few chills. (hide spoiler)]

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Lena said: Tyler’s husband died a few days ago, they received the ashes today. Send them your good thoughts.

Will do. Needless to say, I’m sorry to hear this sad news.

Lena said: I did read Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers, less impressive.

You might consider picking up The Best of Joe R. Lansdale . It contains some of the author’s best and best-known stories.

“The Night Nurse”, Sarah Langan

(view spoiler)[I won’t say much about this one. The author gives us a very creepy tale about the difficulties of caring for children and the Faustian bargains that those difficulties may engender. (hide spoiler)]

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“The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team”, Joe R. Lansdale

(view spoiler)[As a writer Lansdale has something of a penchant for taking outré ideas and kinda running with them. Sometimes the result flops, but in a surprising number of instances, as with this story, he manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat. This is another entry that I enjoyed, even if I’m not completely sure that I should have. It’s nominally a science fiction story. On one level this is just another tale, albeit a well-told one, about sports culture and types of relationships that one finds in team sports. But it’s also about the effects of tribalism run amok. For me the tragedy embodied in this story is that the narrator, Millicent, is smart enough to question the prevailing Zeitgeist (“I thought the problem was just that. The way the tribe takes over logic.”), but in the end succumbs to the emotional conditioning that forged the team bonds. Lansdale (wisely, I think) pulls the plug before the real blood and gore starts, but I had the queasy feeling as I read the concluding paragraphs that things weren’t going to end well for Clarisse & Co. (hide spoiler)]

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“The Puppet Motel”, Gemma Files

This is another entry that I liked quite a bit. (view spoiler)[It explores some of the same ideas that the preceding story does, although the kind of comforting patina of nostalgia that overlays Gordon B. White’s story is entirely absent here. “The Puppet Motel” is another examination of a “thin” place — “places where things peer in from whatever far larger, deeper darkness surrounds us, whatever macroverse whose awful touch we may feel on occasion yet simply can’t perceive otherwise, not with our sadly limited human senses.” Files’ story struck me as the sort of thing a modern-day Arthur Machen (or possibly H.P. Lovecraft) could have written. More specifically, it reminded me a bit of Stephen King’s “1408”, although “The Puppet Motel” is far less melodramatic than the King novella. There were parts of this story I found remarkably creepy and unsettling — for example, the use of Loren’s iPhone as a kind of ouija; and Loren’s ruminations on the nature of what she witnessed. “Was Miss Barrie only ever what she seemed, a drained shell run long-distance, a mask over something far worse? Or is she still hanging there in darkness even now, two or three plaster-layers down, waiting in vain for a rescue that never comes?” Good stuff. (hide spoiler)]

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Lena asked: How did your pipes fair? A lot of my neighbors have had explosions.

It looks as though they survived unscathed. I consider myself lucky in that respect. In an earlier message I outlined a bunch of steps one could take in preparation for a cold weather outage. When I lived up north the idea of insulating pipes was more or less second nature, but having been back in south central Texas for a while, we kind of forgot that this could ever be an issue. As I said, we were lucky. Others I know were less fortunate.

How about you, Lena? Did you lose power at any time?

Lena said (in part): Texas is the only state with unregulated power.

You kinda beat to the punch, Lena.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from our U.S. House representative bemoaning the state of affairs regarding the grid failure. His proposed solution? More deregulation. I could heated our house for a while with the steam that came out of my ears upon reading that.

Graeme said (in part): "Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday."

Thanks, Graeme. Two days without power and water was bad enough. Being without for a month is the sort of experience I could have handled in my younger days; going through that as an older adult is not something I would relish.

I have to admit that the article you cited (and the way in which the quoted ERCOT officials pat themselves on the back) rubs me the wrong way. I don’t necessarily dispute the validity of the stated claims. It is what the officials do not say that bugs me. Specifically, ERCOT is one of the reasons the grid was in this fragile position in the first place.

Power and water back on! Woo-hoo!!

Lena said (in part): Cruella: Where Emma Stone desperately channels Eva Green. Why didn’t they just cast Eva Green?

My initial impression is that Cruella looks like a Disney version of the Harley Quinn character.

“Birds of Passage”, Gordon B. White

This is the first really good story in the collection (my opinion, of course). (view spoiler)[White’s tale of a father-son canoe trip to “a soft place” where “something more surrounds us” is in part a homage to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”. The author also nicely weaves into Blackwood’s basic premise ideas about love and mortality. I really liked the story’s last paragraph and the metaphors it uses. (hide spoiler)]

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“A Song for Wounded Mouths”, Kristi DeMeester

(view spoiler)[DeMeester writes about a dysfunctional relationship involving three members of a not-so-good local band and how the dynamics of that relationship are reflected in the events taking place in an abandoned house that one might describe as “haunted”. I liked aspects of the writing, but wasn’t completely clear on what the author was really trying to say.

An aside: The line about the “hair of uncut graves” that Camryn half-remembers is from Walt Whitman’s famous “Song of Myself” in which Whitman likens grass to “the beautiful uncut hair of graves”. David Morrell used that line as the title of a 1991 horror novelette that won a Stoker award. (hide spoiler)]

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“Ice Cold Lemonade 25¢ Haunted House Tour: 1 Per Person”, Paul Tremblay

I’m sorta skipping this one. I read it two years ago in Ellen Datlow’s Echoes anthology. At that time I gave the story a rating, but didn’t jot down any substantive notes on my thoughts. I have a vague recollection of being a bit let down by the ending.

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Graeme said:

Good luck, Canavan. I hope its over soon.

Thanks for the kind thoughts. I will be keeping my fingers crossed both for myself and for Lena.

Graeme asked: What can you do to deal with a power outage, Canavan?

There are the usual things you do to prepare: Check to see if flashlights are in working order, make sure electric devices are fully charged, make sure you have a few candles on hand, fill vehicle tank with gas, stock up on water and nonperishables, etc., etc.

Lena said: There will be a lot of cold Texans tonight. Keep us in your thoughts.

Yep. About 50% of the the people I contacted this morning in the Texas city where I live were without power. So far we’ve been lucky, but that may not last through the night.

Lena said: Resident Alien!

I’ve watched the first two episodes and, while I’ll probably continue watching for the time being, must admit to mixed feelings on this one. I generally like Alan Tudyk, but I’m not sure that I like him in this particular role.