Wednesday: Finnegan’s Field by Angela Slatter

Wednesdays are short-story days. My recommendation this afternoon is ‘Finnegan’s Field’ by Angela Slatter, a dark fantasy published on Tor.com in January. I love posting about Tor’s stories simply because they each have their own cover art, and I like this quaintly eerie piece:

The girl in the picture is Madrigal Barker, who somehow reappears, without explanation, three years after she disappeared from her tiny hometown. The town is in Australia but the population is of Irish heritage, and they know that “when children go under the hill, they don’t come out again”. Except Madrigal. Everyone’s happy about it and quietly ignores the fact that she hasn’t changed at all in three years, but Madrigal’s mother, Anne, doesn’t think that the daughter who’s come back is the same one who was lost. And of course she’s dead right.

What follows is partly the horror story you’d expect, but it eschews tired convention by turning into more of an investigation as Anne tries to figure out what exactly it is that’s different about Madrigal and track down the person who took her. Even though she has, in fact, spent the past three years in the other world of fae mythology and there’s nothing Anne can do about that, Maddie only ended up there because a human led her to the doorway in the hill. And Anne is determined to find the culprit.

Besides being a quick, satisfying mystery, I also like Finnegan’s Field because it’s a touching story with relatable characters and some tough, haunting choices. Angela Slatter knows how to pack an emotional punch and I find her horror thoughtful and elegant.

The Doll Collection edited by Ellen Datlow

Title: The Doll Collection
Editor: Ellen Datlow
Published: 10 March 2015
Publisher: Tor Books
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Genre: short stories, horror
Rating: 8/10

Dolls scare me. I couldn’t say why or what exactly it is about them that scares me, but I often blame the fact that I watched one of the Child’s Play movies when I was too young for all that gore. Another theory is that of the “uncanny valley”, which editor Ellen Datlow explains in her introduction:

The “uncanny valley” refers to a theory developed by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970: it posits that objects with features that are human-like, that look and move almost—but not quite—like actual human beings, elicit visceral feelings of revulsion in many people. The “valley” in question refers to the change in our comfort with these objects: our comfort level increases as the objects look more human, until, suddenly, they look simultaneously too human and not quite human enough, and our comfort level drops off sharply, only to rise again on the other side of the valley when something appears and moves exactly like a human being.

 

The problem with dolls, basically, is it that they’re “too human and still not human enough”.

The weird thing is that I actually like doll horror, perhaps because I like the thrill of horror and dolls can get to me without trying too hard or getting too gory. That’s why I jumped at the chance to read and review The Doll Collection edited by Ellen Datlow. I find that short stories tend to deliver the most satisfying form in the genre, and these did not disappoint.

This is partly because Ellen Datlow curated this particular collection. Not only does she have decades of experience and multiple horror anthologies to her name, she’s also an avid doll collector. And she made one key editorial decision for this collection – no evil-doll stories. There are plenty of excellent ones out there already, she says, and the evil doll has become a bit of a cliché.

This immediately piqued my interest. Evil dolls are the most obvious choice, so how else might authors explore the theme?

Well some made use of the unnerving parallel between dolls and dead humans. In the opening story, “Skin and Bone” by Tim Lebbon, a man exploring the South Pole with his best friend finds two disturbingly featureless “bodies” in the snowy wasteland. He’s deeply unnerved by this mystery, but can’t bring himself to tell his friend as their relationship has deteriorated in the pitiliess conditions of the landscape.

In “The Doll Master” by Joyce Carol Oates – one of my favourites – a young boy is so distraught by the death of his little cousin, that he steals her doll. When his authoritarian father takes the doll away, he starts a secret collection of very disturbing “found dolls”.

“Daniel’s Theory About Dolls” by Stephen Graham Jones takes a slightly similar approach. A disturbed young boy identifies a doll with his stillborn sister, who he claims taught him to speak while she was in the womb. Her death has a profoundly grotesque influence on the person he becomes.

In other stories, dolls are used as tools to achieve otherworldly feats. As representatives of human beings, they often present a means of transcending our physical limitations, functioning as extra eyes and ears, or as vessels for our emotions or even our life force.

A particularly good story was “Ambitious Boys Like You” by Richard Kadrey, in which two guys break into a home to rob the old man who lives there, only to find that there are strange little dolls watching from the corners and vicious booby-traps all over the house. It’s no surprise that the strange old man is ready and waiting for the thieves, and the story makes for a great piece of quintessentially grim, gory horror.

“In Case of Zebras” by Pat Cadigan was also impressive, but in a completely different way. It’s about a teenager sentenced to community service in a hospital; she handles seeing all the trauma cases pretty well, but one night she’s mesmerised by the incredibly realistic figurine in the hand of a heavily wounded patient, and she keeps trying to find out more about it. For me, the mysterious doll in this story was only a secondary concern; what I really loved was the voice of the fantastic main character.

Gemma Files also plays around with voice in her story, “Gaze”, which is partly composed of an online exchange between an antiques dealer who uses text speak and pop culture references, and a client whose full sentences and proper English stand out in stark comparison. The doesn’t have any dolls per se; rather, it’s about eye minatures ­– small framed portraits of a beloved’s eye, often decorated with pearls and jewels. The dealer is approached with an offer to buy an eye miniature that completes an extremely rare set of a woman with heterochromia (“2 dfrnt colourd eyes, kno th term. saw xmen 1st class 2”, the protagonist tells her client). As she goes through the client’s historical documentation, she finds a story about suspected witchcraft that suggests the eye miniature may be more than just a lover’s token.

In “There is No Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom of the Cold”, Seanan McGuire explores the idea of a doll as “a vessel for the self”. An expert dollmaker crafts beautiful dolls into which she literally pours all the emotions she can’t contain. This is not because she’s an overly emotional person; she’s one of a long line of people whose purpose it is to absorb the excess emotion released into the world when Pandora opened that box (or something). I found this premise a bit silly, but I did like the idea of literally pouring emotion into dolls. It gives them a very dangerous kind of power that McGuire uses to tell a pretty good story. I also enjoyed the details about the craft of dollmaking.

Some of my favourite stories, though, were the ones where dolls were not merely used as representatives of humans, but were actually invested with a sense of humanity. When dolls become people, some truly horrifying possibiilities open up. Suddenly, dolls can see and hear things that no one else records. But far worse than this is the appalling cruelty we inflict on things assumed to be lifeless.

This is perfectly illustrated in “The Doll Court” by Richard Bowes, in which a man finds himself in the nightmarish situation of having to atone for the crimes he committed against dolls. The judge in the doll court is Debbie the Doll Detective, a character from a series of novels he read as a child, about a doll who solved crimes, often taking advantage of the fact that people assumed she was an inanimate object.

I really liked “Heroes and Villains” by Stephen Gallagher, in which a ventriloquist’s doll tells the sad truth of his owner’s death years before. To me, ventriloquist’s dolls are even more terrifying than other dolls, but Gallagher gives this one a gentler touch, while depicting the art of ventriloquism detailed authenticity.

My absolute favourite story was “The Permanent Collection” by Veronica Schanoes. An old Shirley Temple doll describes how deeply she was loved by the two girls who owned her, and how she remained connected to them even after she’d been packed away in a box for years. Later, she ends up in a private collection at The Doll Hospital, whose owner enjoys mutilating his dolls and can hear their screams of agony. It’s an incredibly sad, touching story. You really get a sense of how much dolls mean to some people, especially to children, which in turn just makes it so much more horrific when those dolls are abused

Another poignant tale can be found in “After and Back Before” by Miranda Siemienowicz, a postapocalyptic story in which two children leave their camp to explore a blighted landscape. There’s a fair amount of barbarity to their postapocalyptic lifestyle, which includes making shrunken-head dolls out of all the babies who die in their community. I struggled to get into this story at first, but at the end it broke my heart.

These last two stories by Schanoes and Siemienowicz and the one by Gallagher illustrate one of the things I love about this collection – they really demonstrates the range of the horror genre. You’ve got gory stories like Richard Kadrey’s and “Doctor Faustus” by Mary Robinette Kowal (in which a demon uses a dead human body like a hand puppet) – the kinds of tales most people probably think about when they think of horror. Then you’ve got the more subtle psychological horror that some fans (myself included) usually prefer to the bloodier stuff. But then you’ve also got stories like the ones by Cadigan and Files, which to me are more about voice and character than straight-up creepiness. There’s also a rather cute (if you can ever apply that word in this genre) story called “Miss Sibyl-Cassandra” by Lucy Sussex, about a doll designed as a fortune-telling party gimmick, wearing a skirt made of slips of paper with fortunes written on them. And then of course there are the beautiful, tragic stories by Schanoes, Siemienowicz, and Gallagher where the horror is bound up in the emotion you feel for the characters.

All in all, I am very pleased with this anthology. The writing is strong throughout, and although I didn’t love every story (well, you never do) none of them left me feeling completely cold (although, admittedly, Genevieve Valentine’s very subtle story “Visit Lovely Cornwall on the Western Railway Line” had me rather confused). I also wanted to add that every story comes with a photograph of a doll. Most of them gave me a fright as they flashed onto my Kindle screen when I turned the page after dark. But of course, dolls scare me.

Review of Inkarna by Nerine Dorman

Title: Inkarna
Author: Nerine Dorman
Published: 15 June 2012
Publisher: Dark Continents Publishing
Genre: dark fantasy, urban fantasy romance
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 6/10

In 1966 in Cape Town, Lizzie is about to die for the first time. She is an old woman, and one of only two members of House Adamastor, a secret society based on ancient Egyptian mythology. Lizzie is an Inkarna and will be resurrected in a new body after a few decades spent in Per Ankh, the House of Life in the underworld.

But when Lizzie is reincarnated it is 2012 – 5 years later than expected – and she is reeling from the trauma of being stuck in the Sea of Nun, the ancient Egyptian version of limbo. And instead of reincarnating into the body of a 3-year old girl, she ends up in the body of Ashton Kennedy a 21-year old goth rocker with tattoos, piercings and the kind of long hair she considers “slovenly”. Ashton was in a coma after being run over by an SUV, and Lizzie soon discovers that he is the kind of person who deserved it. She’s also unnerved by the fact that Ashton has a devoted girlfriend – Marlise – who stuck by him throughout the coma and expects to continue their relationship.

While struggling to cope with contemporary technology, having a male body, and trying to build a better life from the ruins of Ashton’s, Lizzie/Ash tries to contact House Adamastor only to find that it has all but disappeared. Something has gone very wrong, and the fact that Lizzie ended up Ashton’s body was the first sign of a sinister influence. Further investigations reveal a conspiracy, the beginnings of a war between the Houses, and the hunt for a deadly artefact. To make things worse, Marlise and Ash find themselves haunted by Ashton’s ghost, who is enraged that Lizzie has taken his body and his life.

The major drawcard of this novel is gender game Dorman plays with Lizzie/Ash. It’s a big shock for Lizzie – a straight, prim and proper little old lady who dies in the 60s – to suddenly be transformed into a hulking bastard of a man who she frequently describes as a “thug”. She is relieved though, that Ashton’s size stops people from harassing her when she takes dodgy trains at odd hours (Cape Town doesn’t have the safest railway service, to put it mildly). Everyone who knows Ashton is also baffled when the man they thought they knew stops swearing, starts drinking tea, and generally tries to behave like a decent human being for a change. As a character, Marlise’s presence brings Lizzie’s gender troubles into sharp relief and offers excellent opportunities for her to face some of the more intimate aspects of the transformation. Initially, Lizzie tries to avoid Marlise, but eventually has no choice but to ask her for help. Ashton wasn’t exactly the kind of person who made loyal friends, and begins the story without money, a job, or a home. They stay together in a granny flat outside Marlise’s parents’ house, and Lizzie is uncomfortably aware of being a man sleeping in bed with an unmarried woman who wants to have sex with her/him/Lizzie/Ashton. The question of sex and sexuality is one that will have to be addressed – Lizzie was straight, but doesn’t want to have sex with men as a man. The thought of having sex with Marlise horrifies her, but if she’s going to stick with the heterosexual norm then that means having sex with women.

I’ve been speaking about “Lizzie” and using the pronouns “she” and “her”, but it’s not long before you realise that such a simple way of referring to this character is completely inadequate. At first it feels right to think of “her”, but the gender of the body can’t be ignored, raising the question of whether it’s the body or the mind that defines gender. Soon, the body (or kha, as it’s known in the mythology) starts to impart its previous inhabitant’s habits on Lizzie, and she begins to swear and behave more aggressively. She is no longer Lizzie, but she’s not Ashton either – she/he is “Ash” a compromise between the two that unfortunately has no suitable pronoun in English. Over and above this, she/he is Nefretkheperi, which is the Ren or true name of this being, which has its own Ba (loosely translated as ‘personality’) no matter what body it’s in, or whether it’s dead and in the underworld.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is the use of Egyptian mythology, particularly the mythology concerning the afterlife and reincarnation. With the modern South African setting, there are no mummies, pyramids, or organs in jars; the followers of this faith mostly study and practise ancient Egyptian magic. There are secret Egyptian societies – Houses – all over the world although it seems that these Houses are self-contained and don’t communicate much with each other. House members are regularly reincarnated, and while they’re dead they socialise in Per Ankh – the House of Life. The Inkarna – those who are reincarnated – are the leaders of each House, and the most powerful in the use of ancient magic. One amusing detail about Lizzie/Ash, is that Lizzie, despite being a little old lady, was so skilled that she could do far more with her magic than Ash could ever hope to do with his muscles. She could have kicked his ass, and in Ashton’s body Ash feels weak until he is able to regain the powers that Lizzie had mastered, including telepathy, telekinesis and an ability to unlock doors.

The novel uses a lot of jargon, and I was glad that I’d studied a bit of Egyptian mythology at varsity, so that I was at least vaguely familiar with some of the words and concepts. I think that someone unacquainted with the mythology might be a bit lost, although the frequency with which Lizzie/Ash repeats most words and phrases means you can eventually pick up their meanings on your own. There’s plenty of time to get yourself acquainted with the mythology, as most of the story is quite relaxed – Lizzie transitions into Ash, gets a job, tries to define his relationship with Marlise, and goes looking for Leonora, the last living member of House Adamastor. Things heat up once Ashton starts making his ghostly appearances and Ash learns more about the conspiracy that put Lizzie in the wrong body. His relationship with Marlise slowly evolves, and although Marlise clearly wants it to be sexual, she is at least happy that Ash is a friendlier, more considerate person than Ashton, who cheated on her and dumped her repeatedly.

It’s a good story, but there were some things that bugged me about it. Ashton’s parents are around in the beginning of the novel, and Lizzie notes sadly that these poor people sold their house to pay Ashton’s medical bills. Because Lizzie/Ash tries to make amends for the terrible things Ashton did, I thought this would include an apology to his parents at the very least. But once he leaves to live with Marlise, his parents disappear from the plot without so much as a phone call to check up on their son, who just woke up from a months-long coma. I felt that an emotional connection was left dangling.

Then Lizzie/Ash adapts a little too quickly to life in 2012, I thought. Besides an inability to drive and difficulty using the internet, jumping 46 years into the future doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue. Cape Town is still familiar enough for her/him to get around easily. Ash mentions the SUVs our politicians drive and at one point voices a concern about security cameras; I wondered if the character would really be thinking like that so soon.

Some plot details were too clichéd or predictable. Marlise is a bit of a damsel and when she’s in distress, Ash comes in like a goth knight wielding Egyptian magic to save her. There are some rather flat ‘minion’ characters. It was no surprise that Ash eventually overcame his sexuality issues and started sleeping with Marlise. The romance builds slowly, but Ash’s reluctance and the sexualised or attractive ways in which he is sometimes described make a sexual relationship inevitable as far as literary tradition is concerned. Admittedly, I wanted this to happen, and I if I were the author I would never have passed up the opportunity to make Ash confront this issue. The sex scenes were a bit too melodramatic for me (much like Ash’s angsty narration in general), but for the most part the romance was ok; I was just hoping that, with the gender play going on, Ash’s sexual awakening would involve something more interesting than him suddenly enjoying having a cock. I predicted a few other things as well, but they’re spoiler-ish so I won’t say more.

Finally, I didn’t quite like the way the book ended. I won’t get into the details, but it had a jocular tone that felt completely wrong under the circumstances. Something creepier would have been much better. The final scene paves the way for a great sequel but laughing about it seems dismissive, while a sense of horror would have been more intriguing.

But, flaws aside, it was a quick easy read and I enjoyed it. I was hoping Ash would cut his long hair (I don’t share the author’s taste for long-haired men) but I liked him and Marlise well enough. Since the book is half dedicated to a dead musician named Peter, and Peter Steele matches the description of Ash, I had a very clear picture of the character in my head throughout the book.

I loved the fact that the novel was set in Cape Town and I knew many of the locations very well. The Maitland Cemetery where the first scene is set is very close to my parents’ home. Ash gets a job at a bar in Long Street, where I’ve spent a lot of time eating out, shopping, having drinks with friends or just walking around. The route he takes to the train station through the dingy Golden Acre Mall is the same path I’ve taken many times to get a bus home from work or when travelling to and from the city centre.

My little shelf of SA genre fiction is slowly growing, and I was glad to add Inkarna to it.

Up for Review: Bad Glass

Hmm, weirdness and horror.

Bad Glass by Richard E. Gropp (Del Rey)

Marketing copy from NetGalley:

One of the most hauntingly original dark fantasy debuts in years-perfect for fans of Lost and Mark Danielewski’s cult classic, House of Leaves.

Something has happened in Spokane. The military has evacuated the city and locked it down. Even so, disturbing rumors and images seep out, finding their way onto the Internet, spreading curiosity, skepticism, and panic. For what they show is-or should be-impossible: strange creatures that cannot exist, sudden disappearances that violate the laws of physics, human bodies fused with inanimate objects, trapped yet still half alive. . . .

Dean Walker, an aspiring photographer, sneaks into the quarantined city in search of fame. What he finds will change him in unimaginable ways. Hooking up with a group of outcasts led by a beautiful young woman named Taylor, Dean embarks on a journey into the heart of a mystery whose philosophical implications are as terrifying as its physical manifestations. Even as he falls in love with Taylor – a woman as damaged and seductive as the city itself – his already tenuous hold on reality starts to come loose. Or perhaps it is Spokane’s grip on the world that is coming undone.

Now, caught up in a web of interlacing secrets and betrayals, Dean, Taylor, and their friends must make their way through this ever-shifting maze of a city, a city that is actively hunting them down, herding them toward a shocking destiny.

 

Bad Glass will be published on 25 September 2012 by Del Rey, a division of Random House Publishing. The novel was the winner of the Suvudu Writing Contest, beating almost 700 qualifying manuscripts. Author Richard E. Gropp won a full edit of his manuscript by Dely Rey’s Editor in Chief, as well as a selection of Del Rey and Spectra titles. Publication wasn’t part of the prize, but Del Rey liked Bad Glass so much they offered Gropp a book deal too.

Links:
Download a 50-page excerpt from Scribd (pdf)
Buy a copy at The Book Depository
Add it on Goodreads

About the author:
Richard E. Gropp lives on a mountain outside of Seattle with his partner of fifteen years. It is a small mountain. He studied literature and psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has worked as a bookstore clerk, a forklift driver, and an accountant. He has a hard time spelling the word broccoli, and in his spare time he dabbles in photography and cooking. – from Random House
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