— Romance in the Library. The Romance Novel in English. Gallery Guide. [Cover title]. Illustrated. [64] pp. The Lilly Library, [2024].
Curated by Rebecca Baumann, this remarkable exhibition, Romance in the Library, likely the first of its kind, charts a revisionist history of English literature, with emphasis on women as readers of novels from the eighteenth century to the present, and claims an oft-scorned modern-day marketing genre construct — the romance novel — as a badge of honor. In the heyday of the gothic, which included the sentimental as well as the historical and supernatural, writing novels was an economic activity open to women even while the reading of them by women (especially young women) was viewed as unsuitable. Baumann’s retrospective claim is an assertion that works pretty well, but one has to abandon one’s preconceptions to find more than superficial kinship between The Wild Irish Girl or Pride and Prejudice and modern formula fiction. The shift from novels aimed at a genteel readership to a vast popular appetite for novels of romantic entertainment is rooted in greater educational opportunities for women at all economic levels and the nineteenth-century achievement of near universal literacy. A welcome and provocative exhibition.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is in original boards, untrimmed. The stylish yellow and red dust jacket for Boy Crazy by Grace Perkins (1931) is spectacular (and it’s inscribed to Upton Sinclair)! I wish I had taken a picture.
[lightly edited for clarity 16 Nov.]
— — —
— Kasper van Ommen. Joseph Scaliger. His Oriental library, and the meaning of scholarship. [Cover title]. Illustrated. Brill, [n.d.].
——. Josephus Justus Scaliger. Sieerad van de Academie. Ornament of the Academy. [Cover title]. Text in Dutch and English. Illustrated. [Universiteit Leiden, 2020].
Two illustrated monographs on the great sixteenth-century polyglot and polymath Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609).
— — —
— The Dagon Collection. Auction Catalogue of Items Recovered in the Federal Raid on Innsmouth, Mass. Edited by Nate Pedersen. Cataloguing by Rebecca Baumann, with assistance from Jonathan Kearns. Illustrations by Liv Rainey-Smith and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia. Layout and Design by Andrew Leman. [PS Publishing, January 2024].
A catalogue of imaginary objects, rigorously described, with their history in vignettes by a wide variety post-Lovecraftian authors. Lot 13, The Geometry of Nowhere, is a dizzying book; and lot 33, the Tiffany Lamp, is an unsettling piece.
— — —
— Michael Connelly. City of Bones. Dennis McMillan, 2002.
— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023 : POD 8 January 2024].
Angela Slatter’s work is now well known. She won the World Fantasy award for The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (Tartarus, 2014), and has picked up several several others along the way. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings demonstrates a range of tones and geographies and narrative structures, among them a dark Sherlock Holmes incident interrogative of late Victorian assumptions and preoccupations, tales set in the town of Mercy’s Brook that seem almost cozy until the sharp steel appears, and a Miltonian settling of scores with a hypocrite priest. The title story is really something, a deft, wrenching account of the entangled lives of two sisters. Slatter sets this one up concisely and beautifully, the artist narrator and her improvident, carefree sister : “the butterfly departing on a whim, taking my favourite jeans and earrings, and leaving roughly the same devastation in its wake as a tornado”. When the butterfly image recurs a few pages later, it is the opening of the final act.
“The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne” is a ghost tale firmly anchored in a rural Welsh setting where the weight of past deeds erupts into the present. Slatter’s American locations are sometimes a bit generic but the struggle against ambient misogyny is real enough. This is a collection worth reading.
The last three stories are brief, previously unpublished retellings of classical motifs, with something of the same intensity found in the work of another Angela, Angela Carter ; and the same upending of the received versions. “Pomegranates” is Persephone’s tale retold ; “Lyre, Lyre” is Eurydice’s account, in which the artistic temper tantrums of Orpheus are noted. The last one, “Loom”, is best of all. Penelope’s terse review of the twenty years’ separation, and her knowledge of errant Odysseus (“all the things the birds left out”), just plain sings ! And then there is this swift phrase at the hinge of the story : “unstringing my rage with quick fingers”! My friend Michael Swanwick agrees with me : “This brilliant burst of fury makes the story”.
“Loom” is Slatter’s Homer : all the Odyssey in the span of a couple of pages and a worthy counterpoint to Avram Davidson’s Homer, the yarn of Odysseus in 1970s American vernacular, found in the pages of Peregrine : Primus.
— Jonathan Lethem. Brooklyn Crime Novel. Ecco, [2023]
Brooklyn Crime Novel is a fun and tricky book. Let’s get right to the metaphor: a city street with its posse of fungible boys is the whaling ship Pequod with its disparate crew. These are two worlds that seem self-contained but are not, for each is an economic construct in the service of a global market and deeply entangled with the world outside its confines: the City is the Ocean. The cataloguer of Brooklyn childhoods is blood-brother to the sub-sub-librarian compiler of cetology. So is the Brazen-Head Wheeze. This means I got right to Melville, who (like H. P. Lovecraft) shows up at this block party.
If this were a fantasy novel, one would expect a map at the endpapers or frontispiece. Instead, one can turn to a nonfiction cognate of Brooklyn Crime Novel, “A Neighborhood, Authored”, published by Lethem in the New Yorker a couple of months before his novel appeared (28 August 2023). This is a metatextual examination of the geography and sociology of his childhood as charted in “The Making of Boerum Hill”, a New Yorker article by Jervis Anderson (14 November 1977). Very helpfully, for readers outside the Neighborhood, there is a map:
This is an agglutinative tale (124 numbered sections): a catalogue and “an infinite regress” of life on the brownstone blocks of the Brooklyn neighborhood: the brownstoners, the Screamer, Milt the Vigilante, the millionaire, and others. The boys leave the false oases of family life and the safe parts of the block every time they go out to school. They are taxed by kids from rougher streets and projects, and learn the expected behavior of an urban dance of confrontation, what is said, and the gaps and silences of what is unspoken. “The dance is a dance because no one can tell you in words. The dance is a dance because you have to learn how to do it.”
At first I had wondered about just who might be complicit in this editorial or authorial “we” that began sneaking into the text, but Lethem soon confronts this unease and incorporates it into the narrative. There is a collective voice of the neighborhood, and “we” sometimes means “Everybody”; and sometimes again, that universal consciousness seems to concentrate itself into a single person:
using in each realm his special talents to ingratiate himself to his friends’ parents, too, to get inside all their houses and say a political ma’am to somebody’s mother like he was trained to do, thus enabling him to conduct his serial investigations, C. felt he was the only person who knew everything about this place. He was stretched like a bridge across worlds.
One funny thread is the recurring notion that H.P. Lovecraft’s library has survived in a basement somewhere in Brooklyn (he did live there in a one-room apartment for a few miserable months in 1925-1926), and this gets tangled up with the chronicle of the apprentice bookseller. Some people barely survive their childhoods, and Brooklyn Crime Novel steps into that territory for a while. Cruelties are enacted unflinchingly; and the boys of the neighborhood disperse into adulthood. Sometimes their paths cross again. Lethem shows considerable courage in revisiting childhood terrain, gently mocking versions of his younger self. The narrator says, “Me? I’m just a character in this novel, the one who happens to be writing it. But someone like me surely existed.” He and the Brazen Head Wheeze are scathing about “the novelist”. “He’s the same kid, the kid we knew. He’s only a bigger kid.” When they track “the novelist” to another bar, the Brazen Head Wheeze lets him have it, “You’re our prodigal collective mouthpiece. Our bard, if I may [. . .] Let me take you to the bridge, you said, and you did. You took me to the bridge, and from that soaring span I beheld the city whole and entire.” Jonathan Lethem knows you can’t go home again but in Brooklyn Crime Novel he deftly enables the rest of us visit the neighborhood for a while.
— Joanne McNeil. Wrong Way. MCD x FSG Originals, [2023].
i see things from the under side
Don Marquis, the lives and times of archy and mehitabel
Drop everything and find a copy of Wrong Way.
This remarkable book is many things : a deep history of America through the lens of marginal employment, a social history of isolation, and an economic palimpsest of the architecture of New England mill towns. Wrong Way is the first novel by Joanne McNeil, who has a fine ear for American usages and a sneaky sense of humor evident from the first pages; her entangling memoir of technological change, Lurking. How a Person Became a User (2020) is well worth looking for. Wrong Way is a science fiction novel of the near new future, charting the life and times of Teresa Kelly, a Massachusetts woman in her late forties who swims laps the way others might jog or cycle or meditate, and who aces a virtual hand eye coordination test. “There is nothing to win,” says the recruiter, except that is never really true.
We follow Teresa in a close third-person narration that attends to small sensory details in the present and is resilient enough to sustain digressions into a litany of the jobs she has held over the years. “This could be a good job . . . ” is the voice of a pragmatic optimist and, it becomes clear, actually a pretty high bar.
The opening chapter is superb in its evocation of Teresa’s present circumstances and where she came from. Her first job as a teenager was at the jewelry counter in the showroom for an omnipresent catalogue company. “It was a good job, but those stores don’t exist now. Those jobs don’t.”
Say “Cedars” softly, without stressing the medial dental consonant.
The cognitive estrangements creep in swiftly and subtly as the shuttle bus proceeds from Boston South Station to a long-abandoned airport now repurposed as Render Falls, regional hub of the “worker first” internet company AllOver, “more than a service and experience platform”: it functions as search engine, ticketing conciergerie, payment processing, digital currency, and more. Teresa has been hired as a contract worker in the driverless car division, CR, a “transportation alternative” for top tier AllOver users. The AllOver executives — Falconer Guidry, CEO and self-made man, and Vermont Qualline, SVP of automotive engineering and daughter of a nineties country singer — have stepped from the pages of the business section of tomorrow’s newspapers, and the AllOver corporate rhetoric, ecological self-righteousness, and aspirations to a “Holistic Apex” are pitch perfect. Teresa is mature enough, and jaded enough, to be a skeptical witness, and some of the other trainee “seers” who answered the Drivers Wanted ad voice their doubts about the AllOver mission. “What kind of bottom-up change begins with people who spend fifty gs or so on an app every year?”
‘like a cockroach hiding in the kitchen walls’
The billboard in Brixboro that used to say “We Will Buy Ugly Houses” has been replaced by a picture of Plum Sasha lounging in a CR. Her teeth and blue eyes are clear and perfect. She looks carefree and young. There’s a retro eighties feel to the bubbly blue letters that read, “Luxury. Privacy. Spotless. Priceless. The CR has arrived. See it.”
Plum Sasha is an “icy-looking” teenage influencer and the advertising campaign for AllOver’s “CR driverless experience” is omnipresent. It is good advertising and pretty tough going those on the delivery side of the product. Teresa soon discovers her work as a “seer” at AllOver is not what she expected, and that things are not what they seem. On page 89, Teresa sees clearly: “It seems obvious, from the moment she sees it, but it never occurred to her earlier. Every trainee in the hangar has dark hair. There’s something else they all have in common: slim, compact bodies. It is a room of ectomorphs, each one of them about five and a half feet tall, give or take a couple of inches. Long limbs and short torsos. Bodies small enough to hide.”
At pages 110-11, things as they are become even clearer, in a “moment of weightless surrender [. . .] She is uncomfortable, still, and clings to her discomfort — once driving the CR feels natural to her is the moment she will lose control.” Coupled with the downward spiral of Teresa’s past work experiences — “The longer she worked at the museum, the more it felt like training in reverse” — this might suggest a pretty bleak book, but McNeil’s nimble prose and her eye for beauty in the mundane offer a different arc. The epigraph to this review, the refrain from “ballade of the under side” by Don Marquis, articulates my sense, from the earliest pages, that this is a novel from the economic underside of the American tech miracle. And so it was a small pleasure to see the simile “like a cockroach hiding in the kitchen walls” at page 119, part way into into the narrative drive. For drive it is: Wrong Way threads and weaves through the greater Boston area with a sureness of inborn knowledge — I have visited many times and still have no clues as to how Cambridge and Boston and the Charles River are braided together.
‘Route 128 when it’s dark outside’
We read and write on analog paper, and we read and write on electronic paper. We live in a world where the analog and the digital reciprocally permeate each other; we are hybrids, and so are our media.
Lothar Müller, Weiße Magie / White Magic, The Age of Paper (translated by Jessica Spengler)
Science fiction demands that metaphor be taken literally. Wrong Way is a science fiction novel about the hybrid nature of work in the twenty-first century. Teresa puts herself — contorts herself — into her job in a way that employers take to the bank. Capitalist systems are designed for economic returns with little heed for the human costs. “When things are good with work, all it means is, things will get worse.” The soundtrack to Wrong Way might well include “Roadrunner”, Jonathan Richman’s paean to the highway late at night, Route 128 when it’s dark outside, just before a tech boom that forms part of the geologic past of Wrong Way. The brief moments of camaraderie with fellow seers or with truck drivers are nicely done yet serve only to highlight a chronicle of isolation. I don’t want to leave the wrong impression: Wrong Way is a novel that addresses serious topics with flashes of wit and wild imagination. McNeil takes the reader to strange places. And just what happens in the last two chapters will be a matter of personal interpretation. I can’t wait to discuss it with other readers.
Drop everything and find a copy of Wrong Way. It’s an engaging and provocative work, the best book I’ve read this year.
The Darkening Garden.A Short Lexicon of Horror by John Clute.
Cauheegan; Seattle: Payseur & Schmidt, [2006].
Illustrated. [xii], 162, [4] pp. $45.00
reviewed by Henry Wessells
[First published in The New York Review of Science Fiction 19:7, no. 223 (March 2007). All rights reserved.]
The Knowledge at the Heart of the Labyrinth
The Darkening Garden is a brilliant, irritating book, a dark little jewel of a grenade tossed into the cocktail party of genre criticism.Its subtitle, A Short Lexicon of Horror, is Clutean misdirection deftly understated. What we have here is a philosophical engine, an encyclopedia in miniature (assuming a certain degree of knowledge on the reader, author entries can be found elsewhere or simply imagined) and, most importantly, a record of how John Clute thinks. This last is no small matter.
FUSTIAN by Jason van Hollander
The Darkening Garden is a collection of thirty short essays on topics relevant to the horror sort of fantastic literature. No particular affinity for horror literature is required. The terms that Clute defines will be of interest to all readers, just as the critical approach these terms articulate bears upon all sorts of fantastic literature. (I use the neutral term sort— less charged than flavor or variety — here, precisely, in place of genre or mode because definition of genre is one of the concerns of the book at hand.)
The illustration at top is Jason van Hollander’s FUSTIAN portrait of John Clute. The complete text of The Darkening Garden is available in Clute’s Stay (Beccon, 2014).
Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages. [Introduction by Neil Gaiman]. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2007. x, 210 pp. $14.95 (trade paperback)
reviewed by Henry Wessells
[Originally published in The New York Review of Science Fiction 19, no. 12, August 2007.]
Portable Childhoods arrived with a small note, Thought you’d enjoy Klages’ “In the House of the Seven Librarians”, and an illegible signature. I knew some of Ellen Klages’ work from the Infinite Matrix website and from F&SF; and Eileen Gunn once or twice told me funny stories of road trips they had made together. I was utterly unprepared for the energy and nimbleness of this collection of sixteen stories. Klages treads the invisible line between wonder and the mundane with total control, and her insights intothe betweenness of childhood and the nature of becoming — becoming human, becoming adult — are fully earned and devoid of cuteness. After reading three or four stories, each with distinct characteristics (As one of her characters says, “It’s different every time.”), the range and subtlety of Klages’ prose made me think about how it is I look at short stories: to define just what are some of the yardsticks I use to recognize interesting work.
“In the House of the Seven Librarians” is a playful, feminist mirror to “The Library of Babel”: a tale of an almost wholly self-contained universe of books, but a library whose librarians have names, and who are competent to deal with eruptions of the unexpected into their routine, such as an infant girl returned in payment of overdue book fines. Klages’ story engages the idea of the library in America and the recent shift away from the book as central to the mission of the library. It’s also a great deal of fun, teasing us all with our fancies of what goes on after hours, or when the expected rules are changed: her list of “10 Things to Remember When You Live in a Library” is a recipe for mayhem and laughter, “Do not drop volumes of the Britannica off the stairs to hear the echo.”“In the House of the Seven Librarians” is also the story of a young person learning how and when to assert herself, to move from the familiar into the new.
The precise, rippling sentences of the ten vignettes of “Portable Childhoods” are the muscles of a neurosurgeon’s hands at work, not those of a boxer. Klages evokes the close focus of the child’s world at the same time as we learn of the longer perspective of the narrator, her mother. Each of the sections of “Portable Childhoods” contains the seeds of the others, and here as elsewhere Klages demonstrates an economy of words that brought Lydia Davis to mind. I am thinking of the careful observation of family life in “Our Kindness” from Almost No Memory (1997); Klages is a lavish maximalist by comparison, yet not one word is superfluous. No one who reads “Portable Childhoods” will thereafter view croutons and photons as unrelated.
The handful of short shorts in this collection proves Klages to be up to the demands of this perilous form. “Ringing Up Baby” (published last year in Nature) is snappy and worth of Fredric Brown in its closing ironies. From the famous passage in the writings of J. S. Haldane about an “inordinate fondness” for bugs, “Intelligent Design” goes after root causes rather than secondary effects, thereby surpassing even Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them” (1985): “Creeping things covered every surface, legs and claws and pincers scuttling andskittering.” Postmodern pulp is deftly skewered even as its essence is savored in “Möbius, Stripped of a Muse”.
Klages reminds us that childhood is an unsettled time, and that children are often bereft of power to respond to what the adults around them are doing. The opening story of the collection, “Basement Magic”, takes place in suburban Detroit. Klages describes the stepmother in terms one will not encounter in Snow White. “Kitty, the new Mrs. Ted Whittaker, is a former Miss Bloomfield Hills, a vain divorcée with a towering mass of blond curls in a shade note her own. In the wild, her kind is inclined to eat their young.” Mary Louise is a quiet child, unable to defend herself against Kitty until she makes friend with Ruby, a transplanted conjure woman from the deep South. There is a flavor of Avram Davidson’s “Where Do You Live, Queen Esther?” in the dynamic of Ruby and her employer, but I was surprised at how carefully Klages kept Mary Louise in the center of the story, and the magic that unfolds is ultimately hers. The transformation Mary Louise makes is analogous to that of the unloved child in the Paul Bowles story “Kitty” in Midnight Mass (1981). I must assume the name of the stepmother is chosen with deliberate irony, for Klages works an identical effect in “Flying over Water”.
”The Green Glass Sea” is a haunting account of a picnic at the original ground zero in 1945. Klages allows her narrator to describe events whose portent the reader comprehends far more clearly than the young girl who is experiencing them. There is no condescension or denial of dignity, only (only!) the evocation of loss and the space in which our harrowing present begins to unfold its true shape.
“TimeGypsy” is a tale of time-travel, love, and reinventing of the history of science. Carol McCullough is sent back in time by Chambers, the head of the physics department, a Nobel laureate whom she suspects of having designs on the fourth, unpublished paper of Sara Clarke, a brilliant scientist who died untimely. McCullough finds herself ill-prepared for the intolerance of 1950s California and meets an unexpected ally in Clarke. History unfolds according to the known record, but McCullough has planted evidence of the false pretenses by which Chambers published the work that won him the Nobel prize. “Time Gypsy” is the longest story in the collection, but Klages writes just as deftly at this length as in her shorter pieces. The overt critique of the male hierarchies of science in the 1950s is inseparable from the love affair and the time-travel aspects of the story; I am reminded of the Cambridge scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose contribution to unlocking the structure of DNA was largely overshadowed by her colleagues Crick and Watson.
In the course of reading and thinking about Portable Childhoods, I found myself questioning the nature of my comparative processes. It is not about yardsticks to measure a given length, nor about fixed landmarks that I am seeking as I move through the forest of story. Both notions are much too inert to describe the experience of coming upon familiar signs from a fairly broad universe of stories that I draw upon to orient myself.* It is not that seeing X means Y must be near. Absolutely not, for Klages is not a derivative writer: these stories convey her own voice and sure pace. It is much more that the stories of certain authors serve me as a descriptive language, as an allusive choreography: when reading something new, I recall similar incidents and images and effects in the dance of story.
So when I say that “A Taste of Summer” makes me think of Robert Sheckley, it is not entirely the same Sheckley I think of when I read Rudy Rucker. In this story, Klages works her best science magic: an episode of childhood — a walk to the crossroads ice-cream parlor — is rigorously observed in its fabric of small resentments and the way these suddenly fall away.
Mattie considered her options and decided that a walk with a popsicle at the other end was probably the best of them. [. . .] It was definitely going to rain, and she didn’t think it was going to wait until dinnertime. She though for a minute about going back, but decided that maybe being wet on a sort-of adventure was better than being dry and bored for sure.
And then Klages works a twist of events that opens possibilities to Mattie and to the reader. Crossing the yellow lines on the road, and seeking shelter from a sudden storm in the ice-cream shop, Mattie meets Nan Bingham, who gives her a scoop of a new flavor: apple pie à la mode ice cream. There is electricity in the air, and they seek refuge in the storm cellar — Mattie herself making the comparison to The Wizard of Oz. Nan tells about her hobby, “painting with flavors”, and is suitably inarticulate. Nan gives Mattie a bit of pure flavor, an experiment. “She tasted a fuzzy sweetness, then coconut and a salty tang then a different, sharper sweet and a bit of burnt and smoke and way in the back of her mind she thought about her father mowing the grass.” Klages then empowers Mattie to put the unspoken into words: “this was more like a movie that went from my tongue to my brain.” It is these descriptions of the flavor chemist’s hobby that invoke Sheckley for me: in Crompton Divided (1978), Sheckley plays with smells that elicit landscapes and memories. But where Psychosmells, Inc. is a corporation that sells a commodity to rich, elderly men for whom its use is a demonstration of power, in “A Taste of Summer”, the wealth of sensation that Nan Bingham creates is a secret gift to a child, “like toffee made on another planet. [. . .] It’s different every time.”
Portable Childhoods is a complex and rewarding book. Tachyon and publisher Jacob Weisman are to be commended for publishing it. Ellen Klages is indisputably a writer whose work arose within the science fiction mode; yet even as science fiction is part of the weave of her stories, she turns the garment of genre inside out to remind us that her universe (and ours) is wider than literary commonplaces.
Henry Wessells lives and read in Montclair, New Jersey. His latest whimsy is the Endless Bookshelf, simply messing about in books: endlessbookshelf.net.
— Rosalie Parker. Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories. [vi], 239 pp. Tartarus Press, [2023]. Pictorial boards, dust jacket.
A new collection of 18 stories from this talented author, presenting a variety of modes and settings, plus a fabulous book-within-a-book, “Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences”. The stories also display a remarkable range of voices and a change of register from one story to the next, the oppressive tone of “Home Comforts”is followed by the quiet austerity and sense of the inescapable at the heart of “The Decision”. “Pebble” is a dark fable of modern slavery; it takes a sudden, darker turn that speaks of liberation.
The first story, “Beguiled”, starts as a glimpse of an aristocratic young lady’s privilege and confinement in Imperial Russia, with a flavor of some of the tales of Saki. The narrative moves with concision and perfect pitch to an icy conclusion and a devastating last line. The effect is breathtaking ! and all in eight pages of the most lucid prose.
The title story, “Dream Fox”, a variation on the Reynard tales, is deeply subversive of the patriarchy and the county landholding class. It is the rebellious imagination of the adolescent girl that powers the transformation. The outcome is utterly that of “Kitty” by Paul Bowles.
“Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences” is a collection of nine stories of ghosts and uncanny experiences in contemporary Britain, a book “chanced upon in a remainder outlet or a charity shop, rather than a bona fide bookstore”, published by a vanity press for “the crazy old woman who own all those millions in the National Lottery” and who wants to share her belief in the paranormal. The frame story is told in an introduction and the headnotes to each account. It is hilarious (is it a cameo self-portrait of the author?): in “The Dating Game”, Mary Belgrove tells Scott, “Perhaps we need to recognise that in this case ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead’ may be relative terms.” The experiences (each narrated in a distinct voice) are dislocating and defy reductive explanation.
— Robert Freeman Wexler. The Silverberg Business. [vi], 269, [1, blank], [1, about the author], [5, blank], [4, ads]. Small Beer Press, [2022]. Wrappers with illustration by Jon Langford.
The Silverberg Business follows Shannon, a Jewish private detective who has come to Victoria, Texas, in late October 1888, in search of information about a missing man and the large bank draft he carried, representing funds raised on behalf of a Romanian Jewish refugee settlement plan. Shannon, a Galveston native with a talent for finding bodies, uncovers fraud and murder, and indications of concerted sinister activity in and around southern coastal Texas. We get a clear sense of the “feel of a frontier town” in Victoria, and the people living there. Shannon gets knocked over the head on several occasions. He works for a Chicago agency and has considerable autonomy. The detective talks, and listens to people from all walks of life, bankers and bank clerks, railroad conductors and bartenders, laundresses and rooming-house owners, marshals and horse dealers, gamblers, whores, and rabbis. In the course of his narration, Shannon drops elements of his own history and character. His tenacity of purpose leads him into strange places, and the reader goes with him, out into sparsely populated terrain, and elsewhere.
August Miller Store, Victoria, Texas. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.
Shannon’s first-person narrative voice is matter-of-fact, smart and aphoristic, and keenly observant of his surroundings. He is Hammett’s Continental Op on the ground in 1880s Texas, which would be interesting enough, but Wexler also reappropriates the Western as a literary domain, and goes farther even than William S. Burroughs did in The Place of Dead Roads. Wexler’s achievement is to have created a formally innovative fiction that moves seamlessly, and beautifully, from dream to waking to sensory hallucination and then back to the mug of coffee the waitress has set before Shannon in the dining room at the Delmonico Hotel. He soon discovers that Silverberg, an Easterner, was seen in the company of a well-dressed Westerner with bad teeth and a gambler named Stephens. A conductor describes Stephens: “whitish hair, somewhat taller than average, red-brown eyes, a tendency toward fancy dress.”
Shannon muses:
Was Stephens the man who walked past the hotel restaurant and stared in at me? White . . . blond . . . storm of white-capped waves gouged the coast . . . an oak that had stood for centuries screamed and gave up its life . . . nothing remained, nothing but naked earth twisted into shapes of the dead and dying. I cried for the land, but what use are tears?
Stephens wears an onyx ring with a Greek god carved into it, and demonstrates a capacity to come and go as he pleases. There is often a stench of sea rot as the mark of his passage.
Indianola, Texas after the August 20, 1886, hurricane that destroyed the city. The residence of Peter Clement showing driftwood against it. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.
Pursuing the gambler, Shannon saddles up his horse, Blue Swamp, and rides out of Port Lavaca towards the ruined town of Indianola, which had been flattened by an earlier hurricane. He spends a couple of nights camping, fishing and shooting ducks for his meals, befriending a one-winged bald eagle, and has strange dreams. The next day as he gets near Matagorda Bay, the noon sky turns dark. “Reddish light washed the salt-cedars and cactus.” When his Blue Swamp refuses to move further, Shannon goes ahead on foot and finds an unexpected sand hill on the barrier island.
Sand hills form, blow apart, re-form, eventually becoming immobilized by growth of sea oats, goateed, and other plants. This one was crusty, bare, more like sandstone than sand, and the front looked sculpted, carved into features . . . curl of lip, open mouth, deep eye holes. A rotting animal festered in the mouth.
Then I found the body.
It is the murdered Silverberg. When the weather turns inclement, Shannon passes the night at the farm of Ratface Conroy. Out in the tumble-down barn, “a lean-to strung together from broken parts of other structures,” Shannon’s sleep is interrupted when his hosts attempt to murder him. Shannon shoots the husband and goes after Mrs. Conroy, who is armed. Pushing through a curtain in the sod farmhouse, Shannon enters a giant, ruined stone mansion. He shoots her dead, and returns to find a zombie “skull-head” Conroy armed and awaiting him. Shannon is faster at the draw, and sets the house ablaze as he leaves. This is not the last of the skull-heads Shannon will encounter.
— — —
Though I wasn’t playing poker, the same rules applied — watch, wait, calculate the odds.
There’s a lot of poker in The Silverberg Business, stud poker where only the first card is dealt face down to each player, and all the other cards are visible upon the table as they fall. This is emblematic of Wexler’s narrative method, for the reader sees what Shannon sees, and patterns are deduced from evidence visible and from inferences about what remains concealed.
Time is a hill, a hill that grows as you climb, grows to mountainside. Wind and rain alter the mountain, exposing rock, minerals. Looking back the way you came gets harder. Sometimes, all you can see is the rising path ahead of you. You get to the top. Everybody does. Sometimes sooner than we expect. The journey is what matters. Here in skull-head land, time means nothing.
These fugues and hallucinations and strange dreams are integral to the way Shannon gains knowledge of the strange world he enters. And the reader enters with him, for his voice is supple enough to take in this space outside of time, poker-playing zombies, and a daring escape in the Flying Kestrel, a contraption from the Sonora Aero Club, across a landscape of perpetual intertemporal war. Abandoned in a Louisiana swamp by the pilot of the Kestrel, he finds that months have passed.
Schultz tank at the O’Connor Ranch on Copano Bay. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.
The measure of Shannon’s persistence is seen in the way he makes his return to Victoria and resumes his investigation of the gambler, no matter the cost. Among further clues are strange manuscript account in Spanish recording the indigenous culture of the region, and a pattern of inexplicable land purchases on barrier islands. On a visit to the prison in Huntsville. Shannon finds the prisoner he expected to interview has been murdered. Chasing Stephens down a stairway that couldn’t exist, Shannon finds himself again in the land of the skull-heads, and the poker-playing begins in earnest. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
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In a review of an exhibition of paintings by J. M. W. Turner, critic Jackie Wullschläger usefully articulates the notion that Turner’s work began to push “beyond realistic description”. As readers and writers, all we have are words, but sometimes that is sufficient. The Silverberg Business is a book that demonstrates what fiction is all about.
Continuity is a convenient illusion. The discontinuities of Shannon’s subjective experience — dream, beautiful maritime interludes, fugue states, hallucination, or return to consciousness after getting clobbered on the head — are as cut-up as anything from Burroughs, and the psychological and geographical terrain of the novel are vast spaces, but Shannon is unflappable, no matter how weird it gets. The Silverberg Business is linear and direct in its narrative line even as the words dance across time and space from sentence to sentence within a single paragraph.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to function . . . I . . . Stephens, looming gigantic , his red eyes roasted my flesh. Shriveled strips floated on the waves, adhered to the sides of the boat, and the ocean, all its weight above, squeezing me into nothingness. I swam into a cave, a cavern so vast it held the world, and beyond, the sparkling Mediterranean of Salonica’s harbor. Captain Bellis gave the order “Moor ship!” and our boat thumped into the remnants of a Galveston pier.
Wexler’s prose is shocking, funny, and vivid, and can go anywhere, and he goes to some very strange places (the summary above leaves off about halfway through the book, so buy the book and read it).
Galveston beachfront after the 1900 hurricane. Courtesy of the Galveston and Texas History Center, Rosenberg Library.
In The Silverberg Business, there are also countless playful allusions to elements of American literature high and low, among them Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo; Dashiell Hammett and William S. Burroughs, as noted earlier; and, though his name is nowhere mentioned, H. P. Lovecraft, especially in the sense of menace and the notion that human actors would be serving malign powers and non-human entities. The Silverberg Business is also a notable evocation of Jewish life in late-nineteenth century Texas. Wexler’s narrator unifies all these many fissiparous elements, and the concluding passages are tragic, deeply earned, and very moving. An outstanding work, the best book I’ve read this year.
— R. B. Russell. Fifty Forgotten Books. With numerous illustrations. 255 pp. Sheffield : And Other Stories, 2022.
Sometimes, all it takes is one book. When Mr. Brookes, who kept a bookshop in Brighton, gave handsome young Ray Russell a Corgi paperback copy of Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), how could Mr. Brookes have known where it would lead? Not perhaps where he thought. As proprietor (with Rosalie Parker) of Tartarus Press, Russell has championed and published Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman, Sarban, and other early authors of supernatural fiction, and developed a consistently excellent list of new authors in the field. Fifty Forgotten Books is Russell’s engaging memoir of how that came to be, in a braided succession of chapters (and discussing many more than 50 books).
The two best qualities of Ray Russell’s memoir are the eclectic nature of his list of titles and the delight a reader has in walking around in his library as the collector pulls volumes from shelves to tell stories of books, and of the booksellers, friends, and authors summoned in memory in the telling. First things first: this is an eclectic chronicle of a curious reader from his teenage years to the present, so after a bit of second-hand existentialism by way of Colin Wilson, we get to it. The Hill of Dreams, “better written than anything I had previously read. [. . .] When I went back to Brighton two weeks later, it was to hunt for more Machen, but I was sorely disappointed. Machen’s books were hard to find at the time.” Another early stage in his reading was French literature in translation, with Baudelaire, André Gide, and Raymond Radiguet, and Le Grand Meaulnes (which Russell would himself translate from the original in 1999). Learning of Oscar Wilde and the 1890s led to Ernest Dowson’s Dilemmas (1895) and M. P. Shiel. Russell writes of his quests in used and antiquarian bookshops up and down England and Wales, on an architecture student’s budget. The intellectual generosity of some booksellers is sometimes exceeded by the wiliness of others, such as the late George Locke.
It always comes back to Machen: a copy of the Knopf compendium, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, bought on his American trip to see buildings and the manuscripts of H. P. Lovecraft, reaffirms his esteem for the Welsh author. Things really get going when Russell attends a meeting of the Arthur Machen Society and meets enthusiasts who become lifelong friends. The delight of Fifty Forgotten Books is in the stories of convivial encounters — a certain amount of drinking is sometimes involved — and in seeing the life of these communities of readers and writers described: books and friends* and landscapes to ramble in, what more could one ask? Russell’s first publication was a stapled pamphlet, but two years toil in a dodgy local vanity press schooled him in the logistics of book production, and Tartarus books have since then had both a consistent design style and a pleasing feel in the hand.
Russells recounts the enthusiasms for Machen and Robert Aickman that shaped the early output of Tartarus, and how these led to other interests. Through Janet Machen, Russell became interested in the writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, and eventually founded a literary society devoted to her. After his friend Mark Valentine, suggested reading Sarban, their researches led to a genuine rediscovery and to the preservation of that author’s archive. The accounts of visits to the author’s daughter are great fun.
Russell’s earlier collection of essays, Past Lives of Old Books (2020) touched upon many of the same authors, but here he is telling of his own life and his friends and the tone is different. I note that 13 of the 50 chapters in Russell’s memoir are about books by women authors. I mention this as the early history of the literature of the supernatural is pretty much a men’s club, but during the past several decades, editors in the supernatural (as in science fiction and fantasy), have opened up the field to a greater diversity of authors. In writing of The Old Knowledge (2010) by Rosalie Parker, Russell makes it clear that his partner’s editorial vision has shaped the contemporary list published by Tartarus Press, which includes N. A. Subway’s Rupetta (2013) and Rebecca Lloyd’s The Child Cephalina (2019).
In Fifty Forgotten Books Russell is not defining a canon, rather issuing a good-natured challenge to the reader ‘to determine how many of these works they remember’. While you may have read many of these books, some of which are hardly forgotten (The Quest for Corvo, for example), you won’t have read all of them: my own tally was 16, with two or three more that I have handled but not read. Like two other recent stellar examples, Godine at Fifty (2021), and Bill Reese’s Narratives of Personal Experience (2016), Russell’s memoir earns a place on the shelf and suggests future reading: I am looking forward to The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s (1931) by Rachel Ferguson, and several others. Pick up a copy of Fifty Forgotten Books and see for yourself.
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* I first met Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker in person at the inaugural Halifax Ghost Story Festival in 2010, but I had known of their Tartarus Press ever since I came across an irresistible title, The Smell of Telescopes, in Ev Bleiler’s essay on Rhys Hughes a decade before; I had bought a copy the Tartarus Press re-issue of The Hill of Dreams from an American specialty dealer’s list when it appeared. At that same festival, I met Mark Valentine, a longtime penpal, and several other of their friends.
Stories are told again and again. It is the telling that haunts us, and which we remember in our ears and hearts. Flint and Mirror is unlike any of John Crowley’s earlier novels, for it is a closely constrained historical novel of the life and times of Hugh O’Neill (1550-1616), who almost succeeded in overthrowing English rule in Ireland in the 1590s. If the legend of King Arthur is the Matter of Britain, the Tudor invasion of Ireland is the monstrous and chiefly unacknowledged truth that fixed the pattern of English adventurism around the world for centuries to come. The invasions continued under Queen Elizabeth I, and in Ireland as elsewhere, English policies fostered disunity among those who might have resisted the expansion of settlements. As one of the heirs to Gaelic lord of Tyrone, the young Hugh, Baron Dungannon, was fostered with the family of Sir Henry Sidney, Elizabeth’s deputy in Ireland (and father of the poet). Hugh was presented to the English court, and Elizabeth later referred to him as “a creature of our own”. Hugh O’Neill returned to Ireland and was appointed to various lieutenancies in Ulster. While his “position then resembled that of the many English captains serving in Ireland, he was more adept in advancing his interests because his Ulster origins allowed him to operate within two competing worlds” (ODNB). The English thought perhaps they had shaped a useful pawn, but having been “raised from nothing by her Majesty”, O’Neill soon put his own ideas into action.
The “two competing worlds” at the heart of Crowley’s novel are not, however, those of the historian, or not quite. To the four ancient kingdoms of Ireland is always added the fifth, the domain of those who live under the earth and in the lakes and rivers. The evening before Hugh is sent to England, the blind poet of his uncle’s castle takes him out to a tumulus at twilight, and the boy is presented to “a certain prince” who gives him tokens of a promise and a commandment. And later, one of his tutors is the wizard Doctor Dee, who also gives the boy a small secret object binding him to Queen Elizabeth.
This is not Pavane, Keith Roberts’ beautiful book which rewrites technology to articulate a backward-looking alternate history, for Flint and Mirror is an account of how the English victory rewrote the nature of Ireland. Three centuries would pass before Patrick Pearse proclaimed the Irish Republic and invoked “the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood”.
And yet. The entire novel is closely entangled with all the notions Crowley has always written about: liminal places, objects of power, consequences, Shakespeare, Doctor Dee, the fearsomeness of the Shee, imaginary books, and the changes of the world.
Hugh O’Neill’s childhood visit to the Earl of Desmond in squalid exile in London moves to a rich, astonishing image as the chapter concludes. And John Dee’s vision of the powers leaving Ireland in “no ships men sail, ships made out of the time of another age, silvered like driftwood, with sails as of cobweb” recalls the insubstantial armies and inconclusive battles of the war in Little, Big. Flint and Mirror is a beautiful book, sometimes elegiac in tone, and full of surprises.
