Title: American Gothic Tales

Editor: Joyce Carol Oates

Publisher: Plume

Year Published: 1996

This huge collection was used as a textbook for one of my graduate classes. The forty-six stories included follow the development and evolution of the Gothic genre from an excerpt of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Weiland, or The Transformation through Nicholson Baker’s 1994 short story “Subsoil.” The collection is intended, as far as I can tell, to gather not only the more significant stories of the genre, but also important stories that may typically go unnoticed by most readers. It is the latter of these which makes this collection so special, I think.

When you think of Gothic literature, there are several authors which immediately come to mind. Names like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson, and even Stephen King and Peter Straub are just some of the more familiar names. Indeed, King’s story “The Reach” is, I think, one of his finest, and one of the best stories in the collection. These authors have become almost synonymous with the Gothic genre. Stories like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Washington Irving), “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Charlotte Perkins Gillman), and “The Black Cat” (Poe) have all but defined the genre and are looked at with monotonous regularity by High Schools and colleges across the country.

There are fine examples from authors you might not expect, however. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is likely the best known of these, as Faulkner has included Gothic elements in many of his works. “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury, however, is a wonderful example of the direction the genre went and how it began to become incorporated and even parallel other genres. Other authors known for writing outside the Gothic genre are Harlan Ellison, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, and Ursula K. Le Guin (perhaps the most accomplished and versatile author in the collection) have all been included with stories that range from borderline horror and science fiction to the just plain bizarre.

What is perhaps the nicest surprise, though, are the stories that Oates found from authors I am less familiar with. In particular, “Cat in Glass” by Nancy Etchemendy is a hauntingly wonderful story that turned out to be my favorite in the entire collection. Also strong, and significantly strange, is “Ursus Triad: Later” by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg, a superb appropriation of “The Three Bears” fairy tale.

All in all, this is an outstanding collection that serves not only as a chilling, entertaining compilation of short stories, but also as a reference book of some of the most important stories in the evolution of the Gothic genre.

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Title: The Jennifer Morgue
Author: Charles Stross
Publisher: Golden Gryphon
Year Published: 2006

First Line: The guys from the “A” and “B” crews have been sitting on their collective ass for five weeks, out in the middle of nowhere.

Bob Howard is James Bond for the Generation H4X0RZ. Set in the same universe as The Atrocity Archive (reviewed here), the exploits of the secret agent of the occult are continued with a much longer, and more robust adventure. It isn’t technically a sequel, but without reading the former, the history and depth of the relationship between Bob and Mo, his fiancé, are lost. Still, the nature of their relationship is clear, and the book stands on its own very well.

The Jennifer Morgue is, without a doubt, a page turner for most of it’s 267 pages. While I am far from an aficionado of Ian Fleming’s books, I think that Stross draws the parallels very well, and creates in Bob Howard a reluctant hero that is very much not James Bond. His wit seems is almost self-deprecating and his charm undeniable in a “the geek shall inherit the Earth” kind of way.

Perhaps the single greatest exploration Stross embarks upon, however, is a connection he draws between Bob and Ramona, an alien possessed by a demon. Bob and Ramona become “entangled” by a form of advanced magic, and become physiologically entwined. They share thoughts, emotions, and physical conditions even when separated by great distances. The intimacy of this strange union reveals a depth of character work not often seen in genre novels. The journey the two of them take is remarkable, and I found myself utterly captivated by their evolving relationship.

And it’s a good thing, too, because without that relationship I would not have enjoyed The Jennifer Morgue nearly as much as I did. Though I still think the universe he has created is wonderful, Stross is very much a “Hard” Science Fiction author. His character work, as I mentioned, is as good as anything out there, but there is no mistaking that this book is about the occult technology of his universe. Indeed, there were whole chapters dedicated to explaining aspects of it that trudged onward with little or no actual advancement of the plot. Thankfully, these chapters were over and done with by about the mid-point of the novel, but they made the first half very tedious to get through.

The last half, though, and specifically the final 100 pages or so, make up for that tedium, and then some. The final action scenes, and then the denouement in the final chapter between Bob and his fiancé, are simply fantastic. I was a bit disappointed with how the relationship between Bob and Ramona ended after so intimate an adventure, but I think it was done as it was intentionally in order to heighten the final status of that relationship (yes, I left that purposely vague so as not to spoil anything).

Following the novel is a short story titled “Pimpf” which takes place, sensibly enough, once Bob has returned to The Laundry after the events of The Jennifer Morgue. It is a nice story and reveals a bit more characterization about Bob and, perhaps more importantly, more characterization on the inner workings of The Laundry, but I found it to be the least effective addition to the universe that I have seen. To me it seemed little more than a parody of selfish government in action, and it did little to advance the universe on the whole that Stross has created.

Also included in the hardcover edition is an essay titled “Afterword: The Golden Age of Spying.” Here, Stross goes into great detail on the history of the British spy thriller and espionage in general in the UK and US. I found it very interesting at first, but it quickly turned into a history lesson and I ended up not finishing it.

All in all, The Jennifer Morgue is an enjoyable read, especially for those interested in character and relationship development. The technical aspects, for my taste, are overdone, but I am not the technophile I once was and preferred to engage my Willing-Suspension-Of-Disbelief-O-Meter at a lower level than normal in order to remain interested. While additional books in this universe will likely not be at the very top of my To Buy list, they will undoubtedly find their way into my library all the same.

Next on the Reading List

American Gothic Tales edited by Joyce Carol Oates

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Title: The Atrocity Archive

Author: Charles Stross

Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press

Year Published: 2004

First Line: “Green sky at night; hacker’s delight.”

I’ve been wanting to pick up something by Stross for a while now, as the buzz about him all across the netosphere has been tremendously positive. Needless to say I was delighted when my buddy Nick gave me The Jennifer Morgue for Christmas last year. And then I found out that while Jennifer isn’t really a sequel, The Atrocity Archive sort of sets the stage for it, and being the OCD series-whore that I am, I of course zipped over to Amazon and picked up The Atrocity Archive before I even considered starting Jennifer.

First off, there are four distinct parts to The Atrocity Archive (well… five if you count the Glossary, but more on that later). The first is an Introduction by Ken MacLeod. It’s an interesting look at Stross and how he thinks, but it’s short enough to act more of an advertisement than anything else. Not necessarily a bad thing for a newish author (in 2004) to have a “buy this now” endorsement from someone as prolific as MacLeod. The last section is a robust Afterward by Stross detailing what he sees as parallels between the spy thriller, the mystery, and his own science fiction. It is a really interesting read, and I enjoyed it as much as I did the fiction between the Intro and the Afterward.

And speaking of the fiction between, perhaps it’s because I came to it a bit ass-backwards through Jennifer, it caught me by surprise that what I assumed was a novel was actually two separate novellas, “The Atrocity Archive” and “The Concrete Jungle.” They are related in that they share the same universe and characters, but they aren’t linked and stand perfectly well on their own. And I think I actually enjoyed them more because of this. It gave me a firm breaking point where I could catch my breath before I dove back into another story.

And I needed that break. I thoroughly enjoyed both stories, but Stross’ narrative voice took me quite a bit of getting used to. I am not a real “hard” science kind of reader (or writer, for that matter). I am more interested in character development, psychology, and sociology than I am technology. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I wish I was more conversant in the more complex aspects of it than I actually am, but more often than not I find hard science fiction to exist because of the “big idea” of something technological, and that gets boring for me pretty quick. Especially boring in this case was having to use the Glossary so often to refer to what the governmental abbreviations all stood for. In the end I stopped caring and just flew past the three or four letter monikers without giving them much thought, which meant all these various agencies just got lumped under “government stuff” in my brain. Perhaps that was, in some way, the point, but it bothered me that I had stopped caring about part of Stross’ world-building.

One piece of good news, though, is that even though I reached the point of tedium with having to check the Glossary, I was never bored with The Atrocity Archive itself. The ideas and development behind the Stross’ “big idea” technology kept me hooked and were strong enough to make up for what frustrated me. And what frustrated me the most, you ask? I wanted to be smarter than I am. Stross didn’t quite make me feel stupid, but the technology he puts out there is so rooted in possibility (or at least seems to be) that I was forever trying to figure out where exactly his leap from computers to magic originates. More than that, because it was all just barely over my head, I always felt that I was just on the brink of understanding something profoundly important, but that understanding was always just beyond my reach. It wasn’t until I actually stopped trying to figure it all out and just accepted it as Stross explained it that I actually began to really get into the stories.

I think that may well be the single reason why I enjoyed “The Concrete Jungle” more than I did “The Atrocity Archive.” By the time I got to it, I had lowered the bar on my Willing-Suspension-Of-Disbelief-o-Meter and was just soaking up the technology right along with the story. That and the fact that there are some fairly significant and highly technical info-dumps scattered throughout “Atrocity.” I think they needed to be there in order to establish different factors of his world, but they were the least interesting part of the story he was telling.

The other piece of good news is this…

With these two novellas, Stross has created a universe that I absolutely love. His main character is infinitely charming as he struggles with being turned from a cubicle-riding desk-jockey into a secret agent for a government agency that doesn’t exist. The relationships Stross builds along the way intermix with the technology he has created and they compliment each other supremely well. In the end, it is the building of his main character that kept me totally involved in the story. My only complaint is that there was no love-interest continued in “The Concrete Jungle.” The relationship between Bob and Mo was fun to watch as it developed, and the lack of continuation in the second novella was something that was sorely missed.

At the end of the day, The Atrocity Archive is a fun read, but not one I would recommend to anyone not at least a casual fan of technologically-focused science fiction.

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Title: Talk to the Hand

Author: Lynne Truss

Publisher: Gotham Books

Year Published: 2005

Had not my friend given me Talk to the Hand for Christmas last year, I would never have read it on my own. Even though my tastes are fairly broad, this one happens to fall outside my usual browsing area. Way outside. But that’s ok. That’s what friends are for. To steer us back onto the path when we happen to wander a bit off course. Or to take us gently by the hand, guide us over to the garden and to thrust our face down into the flower bed when we don’t take the time to stop and give them a big ol’ sniff. Not only did I sniff, I breathed deep and thoroughly enjoyed floral dunking.

Talk to the Hand is a book on manners. Now before you start with the one-liners, it isn’t a “how-to” book, something written to detail the proper etiquette of text-messaging or which fork is for the salad and which is for the shrimp. Rather, it’s a casual study of the apparent lack of manners that is so prevalent in society today. Much of it is focused on the English culture (Ms. Truss is English, you see), but as a High School teacher over here on this side of the pond, I feel safe in assuring Ms. Truss that most, if not all of what she says is just as pertinent in the States as it is in her neck of the woods.

At times uproariously funny, Ms. Truss had me talking to myself, agreeing with her own perceptions and laughing at her hysterically sad examples. Written much like a personal essay, there were times when she got bogged down with what other people think, but always she returned to the strength of the book… the power of her observations and interpretations, and the complexity and intelligence of her sense of humor.

I have another of her books waiting in the wings (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) and am happy to have it so close the top of the stack. If she treats grammar anything like she treats rudeness, it will be another fast, fun read.

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