Anders Monsen

Lost worlds and ports of call

Category: books (Page 10 of 19)

Brad Linaweaver’s Clownface

December 31, 2019 /

This is a book I’ve long wanted, but for one reason or another, never seemed to find the right opportunity. Published in 1999 by J.Neil Schulman’s Pulpless.com, Inc. ( a strange name for a publishing company), I might have held back from buying it as I once considered trying to publish my own collection of Brad Linaweaver stories. Despite having zero book publishing experience, I always wanted to try to publish the complete store stories of either Linweaver or Michael Shea.

I’d read many of Linaweaver’s stories in their original settings, either magazines of anthologies. I considered him a friend, and we spoke often via phone, email, or the occasional old-fashioned letter. I own or owned almost all his other books – novels like Moon of Ice and The Land Beyond Summer, and the libertarian anthology, Free Space. At one point I owned all the Doom novelizations, but I think they went out during one of my infrequent book purges, which happens when I run out space and need to move some of the books. When I learned of his death in August of 2019, I felt I needed this book. The fact that publisher Schulman died earlier that same month is a strange coincidence.

Clocking in at nearly 600 pages, with 43 stories and an introduction from writer Victor Koman, the first thing that strikes you is the cover. Garish, over the top, it’s probably fitting at some level, since Linaweaver was a huge fan of the B-movie genre. There are just over forty stories in the book. As I don’t have a complete bibliography, I don’t know if these are all his stories. Given that it appeared 20 years ago, perhaps he wrote more stories since then, although I think his focus shifted to movies and his Mondo Cult publications.

I won’t attempt to review each of the 40 plus stories. I’ve done this with shorter collections in various other publications, where editors have complained about a lack of themes in how I group the stories covered in those short reviews. I’ve always found it difficult to review anthologies or collections. Often one writes a sentence or fragment of a sentence about or story, a paragraph about another, and forget to mention one or two more. Those collections generally average a dozen or so entries. A book with nearly four times that number would make for a long essay, and a worn-out reviewer (and reader).

The great thing about Linaweaver was his enthusiasm for everything. He advocated ceaseless for everything he liked, from writers to movies, and yes, even himself. It’s a situation all writers find themselves forced into: selling themselves to the paying audience, the reader. He did garner some great reviews in his time, even a Nebula nomination and mention in some of the year’s best anthologies. This collection, while it’s still available, is one I think many SF (and horror/fantasy) fans would like, although perhaps tastes have changed enough since 1999 to prove me wrong. Maybe Linaweaver stories are now more of the guilty pleasure kind, forays into politically incorrect tales that likely as not would end up getting people cancelled.

Each story comes with an introduction by the author, which I’ve tended to enjoy as much as the stories themselves. These small notes give us insights into the author’s mind as he wrote them, or tried to get them published. My one regret is that I didn’t get a chance to tell Linaweaver in person how much I enjoyed the book.

Speaks the Nightbird

December 31, 2019 /

I used to read Robert McCammon’s books in the 1990s. Maybe not all of them, but the vast majority. I have the Dark Harvest editions of Swan Song and They Thirst, several paperbacks, and the hardback editions of Boy’s Life and Mine, his two “last” novels. At least, until he resurfaced with Speaks the Nightbird, a hefty book set in 1699 South Carolina, published in 2002, a decade after Gone South.

I picked up Speaks the Nightbird by chance in a used bookstore a couple of years ago. I didn’t even know he was back in the business. It sat, unread, until I glanced through it this month and then read it cover to cover over one weekend, all 726 pages.

There are sequels, but all apparently published by small presses, either Subterranean Press or Cemetery Dance. These fetch a hefty price on the secondary market, especially the second volume in his series with protagonist Matthew Corbett. It’s great to see McCammon back as a writer. I just wish the regular publishers would pick up his books and print them again. This is superb historical fiction, and it baffles the mind that not a single major publisher is aware of the potential there.

Swords in the Mist

December 31, 2019 /

Centipede Press continues it’s superb series of Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, with volume 3, Swords in the Mist. There are a half dozen stories in this book, illustrations, and some additional texts at the end, and an introduction by Tim Powers, another of my favorite authors. The wrap-around cover is again beyond amazing.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

March 22, 2018 /

Michael Shea (1946-2014) remains one of my top five fantasy writers, along with Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and James P. Blaylock. I’d include Tim Powers there, and maybe shift Blaylock out of the mix in favor or a more traditional fantasy writer like Lord Dunsany or possibly Charles de Lint, but Powers, Blaylock, and de Lint stand slightly off to the side in terms of traditional fantasy. Powers is more science-fantasy, and de Lint’s urban fantasy doesn’t venture as much into the realm of the weird as the others listed. Blaylock lately has written a fair amount of Steampunk, but his other tales are infused with a subtle fantasy similar to Powers.

Shea, however, with his novels and short stories, is firmly in the fantasy camp, with a dash or horror in some of his short stories. His death came all-too-soon, with several novels still in the pipeline and his genius far from fully recognized.

I first encountered Michael Shea’s writings in 1986 or 1987 when I bought his unofficial sequel to Jack Vance’s Eyes of the Underworld. Although A Quest for Simbilis first appeared in 1974 under the DAW imprint, my first copy was the Grafton paperback edition published in 1985, which I bought in Oslo or Bergen at a book store or bus station; it was a long time ago and I don’t remember the exact details . At some point later in the US I found the DAW first edition from 1974 in a used book store. I think I laughed out loud with glee as this copy is in near pristine shape, and I own both these two editions and have read them both multiple times.

I already was a huge fan of Jack Vance by the time I read Shea’s novel, and the fact that I started looking for any Shea book after reading this one meant that he had that certain unique quality about fantasy writers that I enjoy—imagination and language, or style and panache. I bought every paperback I could find, and also the Arkham House collection, Polyphemus, which I have read multiple times. The titles roll off my tongue: In Yana, the Touch of Undying ; The Color Out of Time ; Nifft the Lean—all DAW books and each one its own treasure in my small library. Then many years with nothing aside from occasional novellas or slim collections published by small press publishers, until Baen Books published two Nifft sequels: The Mines of Behemoth and The A’rak. Whenever I could find his original short stories I bought the magazines, and at some point I lacked only two stories, to my great despair. Along came Centipede Press in 2008 and published a near complete and massive edition of Shea stories, The Autopsy and Others. Alas, the two stories I had been unable to locate were not included in this massive, 500+ page oversized edition.

I reviewed a couple of Shea books for Lawrence Person’s Nova Express, planned on writing more until that magazine silently vanished amid the Great Shift to the Internet in the early 2000s. Tor Books published The Extra, expanded from a short stories that originally appeared in the Arkham House collection. This was the first of a trilogy, but only the sequel appeared prior to Shea’s death, Assault on Sunrise. A third novel may or may exist. I don’t know. Other novels were hinted at in various publications.

In 2016 Hippocampus Press published a tribute to Shea, And Death Shall Have No Dominion. The cover reprints Michael Whelan’s brilliant painting for the DAW edition of Nifft the Lean. Four short stories are included, only one of them a reprint. A trove of poems fill the middle section, along with tributes from the people lucky enough to have met and known Shea. Although I admired his work and wrote about it in various places, I never met him, never had his sign any of my books. Once, I received an appreciative email from Shea via Person, publisher of Nova Express, regarding one of my reviews, but I never communicated with Shea. I figured maybe one day I’d go to a World Fantasy convention, where I’d meet Shea, and learn than reality isn’t the same as fiction. It’s weird to read all the tributes to the man, the writer, and realize that he’d probably have been better in person.

Why does Michael Shea’s fiction matter? I glanced through the opening pages of Nifft the Lean recently. This is a dangerous act, as one inevitably gets sucked right into the story. Consisting of four loosely connected novellas, episodes in Nifft’s life, these tales are narrated or written down by a third party. In the first story Nifft relates a tale to a companion as they are camped for the night amid the branches of a vast tree. In that sense, it’s a story within a story within a story. The prose is vivid yet spare, with humor infused in the strangest places, such as when Nifft fights a lizard guide to the Taker of Souls and attempt a “kick in the fork,” as Terry Pratchett’s characters in Discworld would say. Nifft’s advice to his companion regarding this technique? Don’t even think about it.

Shea’s fiction often has dwelled  in that intersection of fantasy and horror. Although he started out in 1974 with a semi-authorized sequel to a Jack Vance novel, Shea’s fiction already was a shade darker. His Nifft stories owes as much to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories as it does Vance, as Nifft rarely works alone, although his companions are not always the same. Yet both Leiber and Vance wrote mainly lighthearted tales, though some humor came across as mordant. Not so in Shea’s fiction, where the heroes venture into various pockets and sections of hell. Even his modern stories, such as “The Angel of Death” or “The Extra” (expanded into a novel), or “I, Said the Fly” contain more than a touch of dark weirdness.

I’m not much of a Lovecraft fan. Many years ago I wrote a Cthulhu mythos short story, although it was more a consequence of work and reading “Fat Face” than anything by Lovecraft. Shea had that affect, I think, as his Cthulhu stories blend the atmosphere of horror with modernity. I have yet to ride a bus without thinking about “The Horror on the #33,” but every such tale is equally memorable.

What I do find memorable in almost every story by Michael Shea is the densely rich prose. He shares this ability with Vance and Clark Ashton Smith. While some arcane or invented words fall flat in fiction, these three writers make it look easy.  Sadly, most of modern fantasy consists of books with swords or wands on their covers, and deal with wizards or Robin Hood-lookalikes battling evil kings or mages. The magical prose is lacking, the sense of wonder from the writing lacking. These books are churned out by the bucketful, while stories by writers like Shea, Vance, Smith, Leiber exist these mostly in the realm of the small press. In that sense, the golden age is long gone. The good news is that in the bibliography section in this book there are several stories listed that I haven’t yet read. Maybe one day a publisher will collect the rest of those stories in a companion to The Autopsy and Others, and include those two older pieces that were left out. In the meantime, we have books like this to remind us what we had, and what is gone.

The Complaints review

March 4, 2018 /

Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin is best known for his gritty Inspector John Rebus novels, set in Edinburgh. The actions in Rankin’s novels take place in real time, such that Rebus eventually retired from the force, with 2007’s Exit Music. Since then Rebus has appeared in four other novels in a civilian capacity, while still helping solve crimes. After Rebus’ retirement, Ranking started another series, featuring Malcolm Fox, an inspector with the Scottish equivalent of Internal Affairs, called Complaints and Conduct. The first novel in the series is The Complaints, published in 2009.

Fox is both different from Rebus and similar. A former alcoholic, Fox is now a teetotaler, unlike the hard-drinking Rebus. They’ve both been married and divorced, but Fox’s marriage didn’t last long enough to produce children. He seems to fail with the opposite sex, unlike Rebus who has regular relationships, though most tend not to last. Working in the Complaints division, Fox initially comes across as a bit of a moralistic person, with a stiff, almost Calvinist personality. Yet when the chips are down and he’s forced into a corner, Fox is not above bending rules, lying, and pushing relentlessly against anyone he encounters, either criminals or superiors in the police force.

The novel opens with Fox having brought a case against a supposed crooked cop. Apparently there are few of these in Edinburgh, as the Complaints division is staffed with only three officers, one quite new. With no current cases, Fox is loaned to a vice division, one specializing in handling crimes against minors. He’s brought into their current case since another cop, Jamie Breck, is suspected of illegal online activity. Problems and conflicts arise when Fox’s sister’s boyfriend is found brutally murdered only days after he broke the arm of his girlfriend, and the investigating officer is none other than the suspect Fox has been tasked with investigating.

The Complaints is a novel dealing with good people doing stupid things, especially Fox. There are times Fox should know better, but instead of sitting back and letting others do their job, he thinks only he can find the answer. This results in his suspension from the force, along with Breck. This step falls into the typical cop theme, and once suspended Fox doesn’t just kick back his heels and relax, but manages to work himself back into the investigation, becomes a suspect, and eventually find redemption. Partnering with Breck, he drags Breck into a series of stupid actions and decisions, although in the end some balance is restored.

Having read all the Rebus novels, even the more recent ones where Fox and Rebus intersect, this was the first stand-along Malcolm Fox novel I read. I found that I enjoyed the lack of Rebus in this book. Although Fox made some stupid decisions, he’s not a stupid person. He didn’t change much over the course of the novel, and he shares the dogged persistence so prevalent in the Rebus novels. Still, Rankin manages to create a compelling character quite different from his regular protagonist. I wonder why he focused on Fox, rather than on continuing the series with Siobhan Clarke, Rebus’ partner and successor in the force, as the main character. Fox only achieved one other stand-alone novel, after which Rankin brought Fox and Rebus together for subsequent appearances.

Amazon to adapt Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels

February 21, 2018 /

The big news today is that Amazon announced it’s bought the rights to Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel. I’m still surprised (no, not really) that Banks never won a Hugo Award for any of his Culture novels, as they are pure SF through and through. The novel will be turned into a series, and likely if successful will spawn adaptations of other novels. Alas, Feersum Endjinn isn’t a Culture novel, but still one of my favorite Banks books, as well as the non-M mainstream novel, Whit.

Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios

February 20, 2018 /

There are some novels that seem anchored in a specific place or time, or sometimes both. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they exist like flies in amber—stuck in place. Then there are books that span ages. Eric Ambler’s outstanding novel, published in the US as A Coffin for Dimitrios and in the UK under the more sinister title, The Mask of Dimitrios, is set in the 1920s, and 1930s in Europe, but feels as current as today.

From Constantinople to Smyrna, from Sofia to Geneva, and finally Paris, Ambler weaves a tight tale of detection by a deceive writer tracing the path of a wily criminal. There is no motive other than curiosity here, yet Latimer, the protagonist, places himself in difficult and often dangerous situations, a strange affair for someone used to sitting behind a desk writing stories, not living them.

The criminal whose paths he traces built a life upon exploration, from fellow criminals to prostitutes to drug users and dealers. He worked himself up form the very bottom toward a place of potential respectability, something that seems true to life as well as multiple works of fiction, where the past of people in power often contains many skeletons.

Although written at the cusp of WWII, this novel could just as well have taken place during almost any decade in the past two hundred years, with wars, smuggling of people and drugs, and criminals quick to murder and betray. The prose is superb, the plot never wavers, and the ending both tragic and amusing.

More Wodehouse

February 19, 2018 /

Since my last foray into the world of Wooster and Jeeves I’ve found a few more stacks of Wodehouse books, increasing my library by nearly a dozen books. While not ideally suited to binge reading, I’ve read a couple more Wooster books, and a pair featuring the tales by a certain Mr. Mulliner, as related to a rapt audience in a local pub. (The fact that my compute attempts to auto-correct the name to Milliner is a sad testament to computer illiteracy.)

The two Mulliner books that I’ve read so far are both collections of short stories, each a tale of some hapless nephew, or cousin, or other relative of Mr. Mulliner’s. Nearly each story tells of a young(-ish) lad falling in love, his travails and eventual triumph. The stories are islands in time, so ideally suited for PBS costume dramas set in England between the wars, although likely some were written after WWII. They tell of a time when young men were gentlemen, often of leisure, with butlers and other people to take care of vital needs. Back then people belonged to various clubs, Great Britain still had traditions, and public school chums were chums for life. Some of the characters that appear in the Wooster and Jeeves books appear in these stories, so they exist in the same fictional universe.

Some of those things are obvious inventions, but I found it jarring to read a throw-away line about a tuck-shop, since that’s the term we used for such a place back when I went to school in Lusaka, Zambia, in the 1970s and 1980s. Some British traditions and nomenclature spans decades. This fact sounds trivial, but the reach of the British Empire stretched far across the world in untold ways. Does the tuck-shop still exist in places today?

While not every Mulliner story amuses on the same scale, and they tend to follow for the most part a certain formula, the ones that are good are dashed good, in Wodehousian terms. They’re maybe not Jeeves and Wooster good, but the best ones rise almost to that level.

The lackadaisical collector

February 19, 2018 /

Twenty or so years ago I bought my first Fritz Leiber book. It might have been The Swords of Lankhmar or one of the other books in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s you could still find the old Ace paperbacks in good condition in used book stores. If you were lucky.

At any rate, I bought The Knight and Knave of Swords in hardcover in 1988 or 1989, since this was the first publication date, and picked up The Leiber Chronicles, the massive collection published by Dark Harvest, in the same year or shortly thereafter. I bought as many of Leiber’s fantasy books as I could find, especially the books set in and around Lankhmar with those two rogues. Yet one book eluded me – Swords Against Wizardry. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, or I rejected the beat-up copies I found whenever there was a Leiber book in the paperback section of the (mostly) local used book stores I visited over the years.

This weekend I found a decent copy of the missing book, merely by chance, twenty or so years after my first introduction to Leiber’s works. For the princely sum of $3, marked down from $5, with an extra 20% that weekend, I’ve now added this book to my collection, garish cover and all.

I find it somewhat amusing since Centipede Press has begun the process to reprint in nice, expensive editions the entire eight books in the series, and likely I will end up buying them over the next few years. At least I have a reading copy.

The Earnest Writer

February 7, 2018 /

Just over 20 years ago, on August 3rd 1997, the writer P. D. James began a one-year project, intending to keep a diary of her activities for 365 days. The complete title is Time to Be In Earnest: A Fragment of an Autobiography. Although herself a fan of reading diaries, she admitted to never keeping her own diary. Somewhat reluctant to partipate in someone writing an authorized biography, her short memoir is a begrudging nod in that direction, claiming for herself the right to write about her personal thoughts and histories. She includes personal information in brief snippets along with daily activities, so this may be the closest we get to learning about her life, aside from any unauthorized biographies. James doesn’t follow a rigorous schedule (a fact which she remarks upon at the end of the book), and there are almost as many gaps as there are entries.

The writing of this diary coincides with the publication of her then latest novel, A Certain Justice. During the year that followed its publication she embarked on multiple book tours, including one to Canada and one to the US. She also signed books at bookstores in the UK, including bulk signings for stock of 1,000 and 750 copies. On my bookshelf sits a signed first edition of A Certain Justice. Although it’s the US edition, the inlaid letter addressed “Dear Bookseller, please enjoy these signed copies…” implies James carried out stock signings in the US as well, which seems remarkable generous on her part.

In 1997 P. D. James owned a house in London, another house on the Atlantic coast in East Anglia, and an apartment in Oxford. She flitted between these three locales as well as many other places, a dizzying schedule for a full-time writer. As she’s not a driver, James relies on trains, busses, taxis, and friends to drive to engagements. This allows her to be a constant observer. Twice while on trains she complains (gently, it seems) about the noise from people on their mobile phones or audio devices. Imagine were she to take the train today, where smart phones are everywhere, and not just the nascent audio and texting devices of the late 1990s. On both occasions she wishes for a quiet compartment, which I found amusing when taking the train from London to Reading and Cardiff this summer. On those trains there was a quiet compartment, so obviously James was ahead of her time. Not just relying on public transport, she also walks along the streets of London. Her home, on Holland ParkAvenue just west of Kensington Palace and Hyde Park, means she often travels through Kensington Gardens on her way into central London.

I found it almost jarring when she mentions the Princess of Wales early in the book, wondering on the 17th of August why the public really cares about the antics of Diana and her lover. Only a few days later, on August 31, the Princess of Wales died in a car crash, spurring a waves of mourners depositing flowers outside Kensington Palace. I mention this, not because I particularly care about the British Royal family, but because 2017 is the 20th anniversary of this event, and it’s been in the news consistently over the past month. Reading James book for the first time, 20 years almost to the day she began her diary, the convergence of events is unsettling.

Throughout her entries James muses on her personal history as well as presents some thoughts on writing the detective novel. She elaborated on this in a dedicated book, Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) though much of her thoughts on the genre maybe surfaced first in her diary. On the other hand, she’s probably had thoughts about the genre and its writers for many, many years.

Often we forget that writers live their lives just like any one else, but I found it amusing to read about her travails with surly bus-drivers as she took the Number 94 bus down Bayswater Road, or shopped at Marks and Spencer for weekly groceries, or even at John Lewis, the department store that seemingly has everything, to judge by the one in Reading I walked through in 2017. Alongside these quotidian events she talks about her role at the House of Lords or jetting to Grand Cayman to visit fellow author, Dick Francis, or to visit Oxford and Cambridge, or other places in the UK. Such a busy schedule, I wonder how she ever had time to work on her fiction. She kept busy well into her 90s, although in this book she mentioned taking on fewer and fewer engagementsas she aged. As an aside, since the event took place after the publication of this book, she opened the crime section at Foyles bookstore in Charing Cross, a store I visited this past summer. It’s strange to think of James’s echoes haunting the very location where I stood and looked at her books.

This is a slim book, and as mentioned not every day of her so-called diary receives an entry. Still, James is a goddess in the field of British crime fiction, and anyone who reads her books will gain insight into the mind behind Inspector Adam Dalgliesh from these pages. Maybe one day we’ll get an authorized biography, even though P. D. James is now dead, and delve more into her mind and life, but for now this small book is a charming wonder and great way to remember her life.

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