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.

“Red Goat, Black Goat”

Early on in this story Bulkin describes the penned goats on the Gunawan estate: “...these were fat, gentle livestock, happy to spend their lives in a backyard enclosure before being sold off to the butcheries”. Reading that passage I immediately thought, hmmm, that has the feel of an analogy on which this tale might rest. And sure enough...

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“Pugelbone”

This is nominally a science fiction story, but in the way that many of H. P. Lovecraft’s tales were classified by critics as science fiction. It takes place in a dystopian setting where society’s have-nots (the Meers, i.e., Meerkats) live in a squalid, overcrowded set of tunnels referred to as the Warren. The story is (in part) about classism, with those in a position of power treating the Meers with a mixture of condescension and contempt. There’s a horror element here as well, but I’m not sure it meshes all that well with the other elements. And the narrative device used by Bulkin is a little shopworn. I liked the ending, which seems to imply a certain hypocrisy on the part of this society’s haves.

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Lena wrote:

Just passed a calendar and gaped. I feel like May just ended but it’s almost July! Did anyone give out/receive Father’s Day gifts? My dad passed a few years ago.

Yeah, kind of a tough time for me. This was my first Father’s Day without my dad.

“And When She Was Bad”

I presume that the story title is a slightly restated line from the old Longfellow poem, “There Was a Little Girl”.

Nadia Bulkin’s story is a quirky deconstruction of the final girl trope so often seen in horror movies. I found it more clever than compelling and thought it could have benefited from some pruning.

Reading this story called to mind the 2012 film Cabin in the Woods, although Josh Whedon and Drew Goddard played with horror movie tropes in a much different way.

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Latasha wrote:

Didn't he write the late breakfasters? I didn't like that very much. I don't think I finished it. I have/had the audible version.

That’s exactly right, Latasha. I wouldn’t judge Aickman by The Late Breakfasters . It was (I think?) the only novel he ever wrote and probably the least Aickmanesque of all of his works. I think you might form a more accurate opinion of the writer after having read a couple of his short stories.

Latasha wrote (in part):

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Aickman.

I don’t think there’s anything of Aickman’s to be found on-line. Fortunately, there has been something of a critical and popular re-evaluation of Aickman in the last 10 or 15 years, so most of his story collections are back in print.

Aickman is one of those writers that readers tend to either love or hate. I’ve noticed that he’s a writer that other writers tend to admire. Here’s a quote, for example, from Neil Gaiman:

“I think that Aickman is one of those authors that you respond to on a very primal level. If you’re a writer, it’s a bit like being a stage magician. A stage magician produces coin, takes coin, demonstrates coin vanished... That tends to be what you do as a fiction writer, reading fiction. You’ll go, ‘Oh look. He’s setting that up.’ ...Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I’m not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully. Yes, the key vanished, but I don't know if he was holding a key in the hand to begin with. I find myself admiring everything he does from an auctorial standpoint. And I love it as a reader. He will bring on atmosphere. He will construct these perfect, dark, doomed little stories, what he called ‘strange stories’.”

I was skimming the editor’s introduction to Aickman’s Heirs and noted that while the collection is intended as an homage to Aickman, the stories are not a strict pastiche of his rather unique style. Nevertheless, Aickman’s stories tended to be multi-layered and ambiguous and I suspect the stories in this anthology will be similar in that respect.

“Only Unity Saves the Damned”

There’s stuff in here about urban legends wrapped within other urban legends and World Trees, but this story is really about the inability to leave home (our “roots”, get it?) and the often toxic effects that result from that failure. I kept thinking about the 1975 Paul Simon song, “My Little Town”.

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“The Five Stages of Grief”

I’m still struggling a bit to fully understand this one. I was skimming portions of a recent interview with Bulkin (see here) and during it she talks obliquely about this story. At one point, while referring to her own history with depression, she talks about stories (not necessarily her own) in which protagonists, in the course of grieving for lost loved ones, come to dwell in “negative spaces” and so unwittingly invite other bad things into their lives. That’s kinda what’s going on here, although the source of the grief (the death of a child) is externalized in a weird, ill-defined SF-like setting. The outline reminds me a bit of those stories in which parents are reluctant to put a bullet in the heads of their zombified kids. I liked the last line of this story, which is a reference to last stage of grief defined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

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A 2017 podcast/interview with Nadia Bulkin can be found here on the This Is Horror website.

Starting in a day early...

I’ll say in advance that I have had very little exposure to Nadia Bulkin. I’ve only read one of her stories, “Violet Is the Color of Your Energy”, some years ago. I only dimly recall the details, but my general take-away was similar to that for the first story in this collection: I thought the writing was intelligent, well-crafted, and freighted with meaning, but I had a hard time connecting with it emotionally. Bulkin is, I suspect, going to be one of those writers that I can only consume in small chunks spread out over a long period of time.

“Intertropical Convergence Zone”

While reading Paul Tremblay’s gushing introduction to this collection isn’t strictly necessary to fully appreciating the opening story, it does provide the reader with some context. Bulkin drops enough hints to allow the reader to figure out the story’s setting and, given that info, it isn’t hard to make the leap and guess who the General is. But Tremblay tells us more explicitly that this story is, in essence, Bulkin’s re-telling (in fabulist terms) of the Suharto presidency. (Bulkin herself grew up in Indonesia.)

I’m still sort of grappling with Bulkin’s use of imagery and symbolism. Bulkin seems fixated on parasitism as kind of an overarching metaphor in this tale. Everyone seems affected in some way or other. Some have-not segments of society are afflicted with parasitism; viz., when the Lieutenant visits an island in order to procure the kris, the natives are described as uniformly afflicted with filariasis. Ironically, the experiences undertaken by the General (ingesting the kris, the bullet, etc.) can be symbolically likened to the intentional ingestion of parasitic organisms. (This line of thought led me to — somewhat queasily — consider the somewhat murky accounts of individuals who purposefully consume tapeworms in order to lose weight.) The difference is that while the suffering villagers are obviously powerless to prevent or cure their affliction, the General willingly infects himself. The consequences to him are described by various characters, the dakun in particular, as being highly desirable and beneficial, but it seems that on both a physical and moral level they are just the opposite. Not only is the General adversely affected, but those around him to suffer as much or more (notably the moral collapse/failure of the Lieutenant).

I liked this story with a few significant reservations. Tremblay describes Bulkin’s “socio-political horror stories” (Bulkin’s own description of some of her stories) as being non-didactic. I’m not quite as sure.

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Lena wrote:

I love all the different opinions!

I absolutely agree. I’m always especially interested when reader opinions are different than mine.

Jaime wrote (in part):

I could only read the stories that were available online...

“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” is available on Tor.com here.

“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn”, Usman T. Malik

Every once in a while I run into one of those stories that everyone else is in love with, but that just are not in my wheelhouse. This is one of those stories. There’s some good stuff here about the immigrant experience, about the narrator’s relationships with Sara and with his parents. But, if I’m being completely honest, I found the cabalistic, cosmological ideas that underpinned this novella rather opaque and uninteresting.

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“My Time Among the Bridge Blowers”, Eugene Fischer

An occasionally diverting story about (as stated in the intro) the effects of colonialism on native peoples. There are some intriguing ideas and images here, but I wish there was more actual “story”. I didn’t feel as if the author allowed the reader the opportunity to connect or empathize with any of the characters.

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Lena wrote (in part):

Perhaps for September we could have an Oldies themed month and I’ll ask for suggestions published before 2000. What do you think?

Sounds good to me, too.

“The Husband Stitch”, Carmen Maria Machado

This is another rather depressing short story that’s going to rattle around in my head for a while. Thanks to Latasha and others for identifying one of the tales embedded in this story, “The Green Ribbon”, retold by Alvin Schwartz and collected in the YA book, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories . I think someone else mentioned this yarn to me quite a few years ago, but I had completely forgotten about it. I strongly suspect that “The Green Ribbon” is either directly or indirectly descended from the old Washington Irving story, “The Spectre Bridegroom”.

I suppose Machado’s story is about the power and pervasiveness of stories (or, more precisely, urban legends). Even if they are not strictly true, they nevertheless say something important about culture, about relationships, about our needs and our fears. Machado specifically uses urban legend to diagram the relationship between men and women. Even if, as our narrator asserts, the husband is “not a bad man”, there nevertheless remains a rather distressing power gap between the genders. The green ribbon is the author’s primary metaphor here — during Machado’s description of the husband’s initial attempt to forcefully remove the ribbon, the narrator’s emotional responses are very like those of someone who is being sexually assaulted. Later in the narrative the meaning of the ribbon seems to shift a bit. The husband’s insistence on removing the ribbon are likened to some rather perverse violation of her privacy; the ribbon is the one thing remaining that is hers, just hers, but the husband seemingly cannot allow her to retain that last vestige of individuality.

A final word about the story’s title. I had to look this up. Machado references the “husband stitch” obliquely in the wake of the narrator’s delivery of her son. The term describes a supposed surgical procedure in which more sutures than necessary are used to repair a woman's perineum after it has been damaged during childbirth. The claimed purpose is to tighten the opening of the vagina and thereby enhance the pleasure of the male sex partner. A quick perusal of internet fails to resolve the question of whether this procedure has actually been performed or is just a myth.

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“The Philosophers”, Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Actually a trio of stories drawn from the author’s 2016 collection, Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems .

“Our System” presents the reader with an amusing and clever analogy about the way in which communication across generations inevitably seems to deteriorate.
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“Two Hats” has a similarly imaginative take on the disparate ways sons conceptualize their fathers.
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“The Madman’s Time Machine” is (in my opinion) the least interesting of the three, relying on a relatively stale science fiction trope in order to comment on the crucial role fathers play in the development of their sons.
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“Wing”, Amal El-Mohtar

The editor’s notes for this story describe it as being about “the idiosyncratic meaning of books”. Well, I guess so. Honestly, if the author was trying to make some specific point here, I missed it. Nicely written and oddly evocative though.

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Lena said:

I thought Tiger Baby might have been a lesson in how far we are from the wild. You might feel like a tiger because your feelings mirror a National Geographic program, or a famous poem, but the truth is you have no idea what is a real wild thought.

Yes, you may be onto something, Lena. What I found interesting (or surprising?) was Felecity’s reaction when her underlying nature is revealed. She might be momentarily nonplussed, but she doesn’t seem to be particularly disappointed. She seems to accept and even revel in her new form. I liked the last line. “She doesn’t look back.”

“The Duck”, Ben Loory

A very sweet love story. This one reminds me of Lars and the Real Girl.

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