Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause: B

October 31, 2010 by 2 Comments

From the back cover:
Vivian Gandillon relishes the change, the sweet, fierce ache that carries her from girl to wolf. At sixteen, she is beautiful and strong, and all the young wolves are on her tail. But Vivian still grieves for her dead father; her pack remains leaderless and in disarray, and she feels lost in the suburbs of Maryland. She longs for a normal life. But what is normal for a werewolf?

Then Vivian falls in love with a human, a meat-boy. Aiden is kind and gentle, a welcome relief from the squabbling pack. He’s fascinated by magic, and Vivian longs to reveal herself to him. Surely he would understand her and delight in the wonder of her dual nature, not fear her as an ordinary human would.

Vivian’s divided loyalties are strained further when a brutal murder threatens to expose the pack. Moving between two worlds, she does not seem to belong in either. What is she really—human or beasts? Which tastes sweeter—blood or chocolate?

Review:
Werewolf Vivian Gandillon can’t understand why the kids at school don’t seem to want to hang out with her. She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Still, the boys seem perfectly able to resist her until she meets Aiden Teague, an occult-loving poet whose piece on werewolves in the school literary magazine catches her eye. Vivian finds herself drawn to the floppy-haired Aiden, and they begin dating, to the consternation of his friends and her pack. At first content with how things are going, Vivian soon wants more, and decides to share her secret. Aiden doesn’t take it well and driven somewhat mad by despair, Vivian begins to suspect that she’s responsible for a string of murders that has the pack on edge.

I haven’t read a huge amount of fiction in which a human is in love with a supernatural being, but until Blood and Chocolate, those that I have read were always told from the human’s point of view. The switch works very well here, as the focus is less on the romance—though that is an exceedingly important part of the story—and more on Vivian’s inner conflict. She wants to fit in with humans and to make friends, and yet clearly feels herself superior to them. (Indeed, some reviewers have found her unlikable because of her repeated praise of her own appearance, but I took this as an animal-like way of measuring her status in a pack.)

On top of her relationship with Aiden, Vivian is also concerned about her pack, which is looking for a permanent place to settle after having fled their previous home the year before when one of their own went out of control and killed a human. At a ritual for determining the new clan leader, she accidently earns her place as the victor’s mate, and faces pressure from her family to take on this role and leave her “meat-boy” behind. I really enjoyed reading about the pack dynamics, and felt that Krause did a good job for establishing why Vivian would prefer a more… primal kind of love than what she and Aiden were presently engaged in. When things go wrong, followed immediately by the discovery of a vicious mauling, Vivian seriously believes she is the culprit. This plot is reasonably well handled, though I found the resolution pretty obvious.

The one real problem with Blood and Chocolate is that one feels at a remove from the characters. Perhaps that is due to the alienness of Vivian’s perspective and way of thinking, which at times turns quite vicious indeed. Aiden, seen solely through Vivian’s eyes, fares no better. In the end, while this is a very interesting book, presenting a fleshed out look at werewolf culture, it’s not a very engaging one.

Filed Under: Books, Supernatural, YA

Halloween Rain by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder: C-

October 28, 2010 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Around Sunnydale, they say a scarecrow saturated with Halloween rain will come alive and slaughter anyone in sight. (Lovely place, Sunnydale.) Buffy’s best friends, Xander and Willow, used to think the tale was nonsense—but after a few adventures with Buffy, they’re not so sure.

Even without a maniacal scarecrow, a Sunnydale Halloween is a truly horrific happening. There are enough zombies and vampires about, ready to party hearty and eat some brains, to keep the Slayer and her friends up all night.

And then the rain starts to fall…

Review:
It just wouldn’t be Halloween Week without a Buffy book, now would it? Unfortunately, this one is nothing to get excited about.

The story is set in the first season, after the episode “The Pack,” since former principal Mr. Flutie (eaten by some hyena-possessed students in that episode) is dead and buried. It’s also Halloween, which is a problem, as Buffy was not in Sunnydale for Halloween of her tenth-grade year (1996-1997). I mean, I didn’t conduct an exhaustive search for confirmation that she transferred in the spring, but I’m pretty sure that is the case. (Update: A sign in episode three, “The Witch,” confirms that it’s 1996, so I was wrong.)

Anyway, there’s apparently a legend in town that says to stay away from scarecrows on rainy Halloweens, because they come alive. After hearing about this from Willow and Xander, a memory niggles at Giles until he works out a connection between scarecrows and Samhain, who is referred to as “the dark lord,” the spirit of Halloween,” and “the pumpkin king.” While Buffy is off fighting a slew of zombies in the graveyard, Giles prepares a bunch of symbols and wards and stuff to fight Samhain. There’s a battle in a field, a barn burns down with Samhain trapped inside, and Buffy wins. The end. Yawn.

The humdrum nature of the plot is really nothing new for a Buffy media tie-in novel; usually the main draw of these is how well the writers capture the characters’ voices. Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder went on to write many more Buffy books, but I’m sure this was their first, as it’s only the second of the series, published in 1997 (before the season two episode “Halloween” established that demons are actually not very interested in the holiday). As a result, their success with the characters is hit or miss.

A lot of Buffy’s dialogue is cheesy and her thoughts rather vapid. Like this one, for example:

If she didn’t start hanging with her friends more, they might adopt a new Slayer as their bud. Or not, since there weren’t any others.

On the other hand, the Xander/Willow dynamic is conveyed pretty well, and there is one brief, simple exchange that would’ve been fully at home in the show.

“It gets worse,” Willow said, and tugged on Xander’s hand.

“I hate worse,” Xander grumbled.

The authors also seem to have a fondness for the phrase “clone that thought,” since it’s used at least three times.

I can forgive a lame plot if the characters are written well, but Halloween Rain is a success in neither category.

Filed Under: Books, Media Tie-In, Supernatural Tagged With: , ,

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe: B-

October 25, 2010 by 4 Comments

From the back cover:
‘Her present life appeared like the dream of a distempered imagination, or like one of those frightful fictions, in which the wild genius of the poets sometimes delighted. Reflection brought only regret, and anticipation terror.’

Such is the state of mind of Ann Radcliffe’s orphaned heroine Emily St. Aubert, who finds herself imprisoned in her evil guardian Count Montoni’s gloomy medieval fortress in the remote Apennines. Terror is the order of the day inside the walls of Udolpho, as Emily struggles against Montoni’s rapacious schemes and the threat of her own psychological disintegration.

Review:
Wikipedia says it best: “The Mysteries of Udolpho is a quintessential Gothic romance, replete with incidents of physical and psychological terror; remote, crumbling castles; seemingly supernatural events; a brooding, scheming villain; and a persecuted heroine.”

As the novel begins, Emily St. Aubert lives with her parents on a small estate in Gascony in France, where they dwell happily disengaged from the world and enjoy hanging out together amongst nature, thinking virtuous thoughts, and composing insipid poetry. These tranquil days come to an end when Emily’s mother dies of an illness. When her father soon after contracts it himself, they embark on a journey to the seaside where his health might be restored. Ultimately, he too passes away, but not before meeting and approving of Valancourt, a noble young man who develops a fancy for Emily.

After her father’s death, Emily is delivered into the custody of her aunt, Madame Cheron, an odious social climber who derives much enjoyment from the “exercise of petty tyranny” and refuses to consent to an engagement between Valancourt and her niece until she learns he has some wealthy relations. Meanwhile, the flattering advances of an Italian named Montoni secure him Madame Cheron’s hand in marriage, and soon the family is whisked off to Venice, where Emily pines away for Valancourt and composes more shitty poems. Eventually it becomes clear that Montoni hasn’t much money and is connected with some shady people, and the family dashes off once again, this time to the gloomy and isolated castle known as Udolpho.

At Udolpho, Emily is assigned a room to which a secret passageway connects, hears ghostly voices, spies apparitions on the parapet outside her window, and lifts a black veil on the wall in a secluded chamber to reveal a scene of such horror that she faints for the fourth out of what will be a total of eleven times. Montoni pressures Emily to marry a wealthy count, but she refuses to give her consent. After enduring threats and trickery on this point and others, Emily escapes in an anti-climactic fashion and returns to France with the intention of joining a convent. Ultimately, Emily and Valancourt reunite and there is much angst about the life of dissipation he led in Paris. Their storyline ends in a predictable fashion, but a few of the other small, lingering mysteries offer surprises.

While I can by no means claim that The Mysteries of Udolpho is a good book, it’s nonetheless an entertaining one. Though it has many flaws at which one might enjoy snickering, the depiction of Udolpho is a vivid one; I’m sure most readers, like me, find the middle section of the book to be most interesting because of the castle setting. I also appreciate that Valancourt is not depicted as the perfect hero, but is often hot-tempered and impulsive. Still, problems are abundant, and I shan’t shirk from enumerating them.

Firstly, and most significantly, Emily is fairly annoying. She’s sweet, graceful, pretty, skilled in the elegant arts, and keenly aware of propriety. This means she doesn’t actually do very much. She seeks to embody “the placid melancholy of a spirit injured, yet resigned,” which means she’ll suffer the horrible behavior of her aunt and Montoni to a highly frustrating degree, or permit misunderstandings to linger when some very basic explanation would clear up the matter. She occasionally shows some backbone and pride, but is equally likely to demonstrate incredible stupidity, like when she’s unable to tell the difference between the corpse of a strange man and that of her presumed-dead aunt. (If you believe this sight makes her faint, award yourself a cookie.)

Secondly, the writing is annoying. I’ve read classics before and am accustomed to there being more commas present than I would deem necessary today, but The Mysteries of Udolpho is positively inundated with them. Here’s a particularly egregious example:

As she walked round it, she passed a door, that was not quite shut, and, perceiving, that it was not the one, through which she entered, she brought the light forward to discover whither it led.

There is also a great deal of weeping and trembling going on. I consulted an e-book edition and, in a total of 831 pages, the word “tears” is used 199 times. “Trembling” yields 89 results. Assuming that each usage of “tears” is the only one on a page, that means that for nearly 25% of the book, someone is crying!

Lastly, I didn’t find The Mysteries of Udolpho to be at all spooky. “Atmospheric” is about as far as I would go in that direction, though I did enjoy the way Emily’s imprudently chatty maid, Annette, freaks out over various creepy circumstances. More than a horror novel or ghost story, the book reads as a kind of moral lesson, best summed up by Radcliffe herself in the novel’s penultimate paragraph:

O! useful may it be to have shewn, that, though the vicious can sometimes pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment certain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune!

In the end, I’m glad to have read The Mysteries of Udolpho, particularly because I’ll now be able to understand the references made to it in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. And I admit I had fun counting how many times Emily faints.

Filed Under: Books, Classic, Suspense

The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages: A-

October 22, 2010 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
It is 1943, and while war consumes the United States and the world, eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan lives with her father in a town that—officially—doesn’t exist: Los Alamos, New Mexico. Famous scientists and mathematicians, including Dewey’s father, work around the clock on a secret project everyone there calls only “the gadget.” Meanwhile, Dewey works on her own mechanical projects, and locks horns with Suze Gordon, a budding artist who is as much of a misfit as she is. None of them—not J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project; not the mathematicians and scientists; and least of all, Dewey and Suze—knows how much “the gadget” is about to change their lives…

Review:
Eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan is used to being apart from her father. She’s been living in St. Louis with her grandmother while he’s off doing “war work,” but a sudden stroke renders Nana unable to care for Dewey any longer. With the whereabouts of her absentee mother unknown, Dewey is packed up and sent halfway across the country to the officially nonexistent town of Los Alamos, New Mexico where her father is a physicist working on what the residents of “the hill” refer to only as “the gadget” but which is actually the atomic bomb.

Dewey isn’t like ordinary girls. She’s fascinated by science, especially radios and other mechanical gizmos, and doesn’t make any attempts to fit in. Still, she’s got a lot of independence on the hill and there are many adults nearby to answer her questions and help with her various projects, so she’s reasonably happy, if a little lonely, what with Papa spending most of his time in his lab.

Her classmate, Suze Gordon, isn’t like ordinary girls, either, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to get them to like her. Unfortunately, like most awkward preteens in this position (and, believe me, Suze’s efforts conjured up some depressing sixth-grade memories of my own!), Suze’s attempts to fit in never work out. For a significant portion of the book she’s not very likable, and mounts a sullen resistance when, a little over a year after Dewey’s arrival on “the hill,” Dewey’s dad travels to Washington and leaves his daughter in the care of his friends, the Gordons.

Friendship does not automatically ensue between the two girls, but after Suze undertakes one last attempt to be cool—victimizing Dewey in the process—President Roosevelt dies and suddenly she realizes how shameful her behavior has been. Slowly, the girls bond and at this point the book finally becomes so good I wished for it to be quite a bit longer! The girls are delighted to finally have someone with whom they can share ideas on their projects—scientific ones for Dewey and artistic ones for Suze—and love of geeky pursuits. I hadn’t realized how hard it was to be a girl geek in the ’40s! Inevitably, the popular girls get wind of their friendship, and Suze is placed in a position where she must make a choice and makes the right one without a second’s hesitation.

Alas, all good things must end. Suze’s mother, normally so adept at being a good maternal figure in Dewey’s life, completely and utterly fails to realize when Dewey’s upset about something quite significant, leading to a particularly ridiculous bout of miscommunication and misunderstanding.

In the end, I enjoyed The Green Glass Sea quite a lot. I liked Dewey all along (though I was less keen on the bizarre shifts in verb tense the narrative underwent when switching to her perspective) and warmed up to Suze eventually. I was immensely glad to learn there’s a sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, and shall be reading it soon!

For additional reviews of The Green Glass Sea, please visit Triple Take.

Filed Under: Books, Children's Fiction, Historical Fiction, Triple Take

Wait for What Will Come by Barbara Michaels: B-

October 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Book description:
The last of an ancient Cornish clan, Carla Tregellas has inherited her historic ancestral home: a massive mansion looming high up on the jagged cliffs of Cornwall. From the moment Carla takes possession of the grand manor she feels right at home, warmly welcomed by everyone—except the strange and secretive housekeeper, Mrs. Pendennis, who warns the new owner of the tragic, inevitable fate that will surely befall her if she does not depart at once. But Carla cannot leave, for the unseen bonds of a dark family curse are beginning to tighten… and a demon lover waits.

Review:
I’m not sure what it is, but sometimes I just crave something by Barbara Michaels.

Like most of the books by Michaels that I have read, Wait for What Will Come features a plucky heroine and an old house. Carla Tregellas, a math teacher from Boston, is surprised to inherit a somewhat decrepit mansion from a distant relation in Cornwall. Her initial impulse is to sell the place, but once she sees a photo, she’s smitten and decides to at least pay a visit before putting it up on the market.

Upon practically the moment of her arrival, Carla is acquainted with the family legend, which says that every 200 years a young woman of the family is claimed by some sort of sea demon. The last occurrence was exactly 200 years ago and, wouldn’t you know it, Carla looks a great deal like her ancestor who went missing at that time. Carla’s an unimaginative and practical sort and discounts the myth, but strange things start happening—seaweed in her room, a distorted portrait—that soon have her on edge.

A bevy of attractive men happens to be handy, and most of them have the hots for Carla (the exception being the vicar, who probably has the vicarly equivalent). The fellows help her look into the origins of the legend and execute timely rescues, but most seem to want to get her out of town in a hurry. After the characters spend most of the book sightseeing, socializing, and/or engaging in lackadaisical research, all of a sudden they’re confessing to dastardly deeds and revealing unconvincing romantic inclinations, and it all seems to come out of nowhere.

In retrospect, the plot’s pretty thin, but I liked the setting and the characters enough that I enjoyed their interactions, until Michaels realized she’d better wrap things up and everything went a little crazy. Still, the final resolution is satisfying enough and I’m happy that a cat got to be a hero, in its way. This isn’t the best by Michaels that I’ve read, but it was sufficiently diverting.

Filed Under: Books, Supernatural Tagged With:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: B+

October 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece of the duality of good and evil in man’s nature sprang from the darkest recesses of his own unconscious—during a nightmare from which his wife awakened him, alerted by his screams. More than a hundred years later, this tale of the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll and the drug that unleashes his evil, inner persona—the loathsome, twisted Mr. Hyde—has lost none of its ability to shock. Its realistic police-style narrative chillingly relates Jekyll’s desperation as Hyde gains control of his soul—and gives voice to our own fears of the violence and evil within us. Written before Freud’s naming of the ego and the id, Stevenson’s enduring classic demonstrates a remarkable understanding of the personality’s inner conflicts—and remains the irresistibly terrifying stuff of our worst nightmares.

Review:
In his lecture on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is used as the introduction to this edition, Vladimir Nabokov urges readers to “consign to oblivion” (what a great phrase) their assumptions about the work. Thanks to myriad adaptations, the image of milquetoast Dr. Jekyll gulping a potion that turns him into a huge, monstrous creature is pretty much ingrained in our brains. In actuality, the original book is quite different.

The tale is told from the perspective of Gabriel Utterson, a friend of Henry Jekyll who also serves as his lawyer. Utterson is troubled because of a recent amendment to Jekyll’s will, which stipulates that in the event of his death or disappearance, his money should go to a man named Edward Hyde. The more Utterson learns about Hyde—his cousin, the “unimpressionable” Enfield, relates a story in which (pale and dwarfish) Hyde trampled a little girl and inspired in one a feeling of immediate hatred—the less he likes this arrangement. Thinking Jekyll is somehow being blackmailed by Hyde for “the ghost of some old sin,” he earnestly attempts to help extricate his friend, but Jekyll is curiously unwilling to accept aid.

There’s a fun feeling of fog-filled suspense as Hyde becomes a murderer and fugitive—and as Jekyll first becomes more sociable then a total recluse—until Utterson is eventually summoned by a servant to break into Jekyll’s office where they find not the doctor but Hyde. The truth comes out in a series of sealed confessions, which, though they contain the truth about the transformation, are actually rather anticlimactic. I bet reading this completely unspoiled was quite fun, though it’s virtually impossible for anyone to have that experience now.

Although I feel like the story is too short and doesn’t come to a very satisfying conclusion, I nonetheless enjoyed the read and was particularly impressed by Stevenson’s powers of description. In just a few lines, he describes Utterson so well that I found it easy to visualize him completely.

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life.

I think the part I love best is “scanty and embarrassed in discourse.” Here’s another great example, describing Dr. Lanyon, another friend and a respected scientist.

This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and welcomed him with both hands. The geniality, as was the way of the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine feeling.

Economy and clarity will always be qualities I admire, I think. It makes the writing feel fresh, despite its age. (And to achieve this when “written in bed, at Bournemouth on the English Channel, in 1885 in between hemorrhages from the lungs,” as the intro informs us! If I was suffering hemorrhages the last thing I’d be capable of is penning a classic!)

Though it be short and, to us, predictable, the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remains a worthwhile read.

Filed Under: Books, Classic, Horror

My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse: B-

September 28, 2010 by 9 Comments

Book description:
My Man Jeeves, first published in 1919, introduced the world to affable, indolent Bertie Wooster and his precise, capable valet, Jeeves. Some of the finest examples of humorous writing found in English literature are woven around the relationship between these two men of very different classes and temperaments. Where Bertie is impetuous and feeble, Jeeves is cool-headed and poised. This collection, the first book of Jeeves and Wooster stories, includes “Leave it to Jeeves,” “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest,” “Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg,” “Absent Treatment,” “Helping Freddie,” “Rallying Round Old George,” “Doing Clarence a Bit of Good,” and “The Aunt and the Sluggard.”

Review:
It grieves me to award a relatively low grade to My Man Jeeves, because I truly did want to like it, but the trouble is, if I may be allowed to borrow Bertie’s manner of speech for a moment, that the stories it contains are “dashed repetitive, don’t you know?” In fact, you too can write a story just like the ones in this book! Make a selection at each parenthetical prompt and you’re halfway there!

A friend of (Reggie Pepper/Bertie Wooster) is having trouble with a (rich aunt or uncle/woman) and is despondent because said person has threatened to (cut off his allowance/break off their engagement). (Reggie/Jeeves) comes up with a kooky idea to achieve the friend’s desired result and hijinks ensue.

The outcomes of the stories are all different, of course, and usually at least somewhat amusing. The story that varies the most from the formula above is “Doing Clarence a Bit of Good,” in which Reggie is summoned to the home of his former sweetheart, who has manipulated him thither with tales of an excellent golf course nearby but who really wants him to steal an ugly painting by her husband’s father. I probably should’ve seen the end result coming, but didn’t.

The relationship between Jeeves and Wooster is also enjoyable, with Wooster being terribly impressed by the “devilish brainy” Jeeves and occasionally rewarding him for his achievements by casting off ties, hats, or mustaches that have offended Jeeves’s delicate sensibilities. I’m a little sad that Jeeves’s intellect is used primarily for schemes of deception, though, and hope that won’t always be the case. There are a couple of occasions where he quietly works a solution of his own while Bertie is away, and I found those better examples of his cleverness than simply advising someone to pretend to have written a book on birds in order to appeal to a rich uncle with an ornithological bent.

There’s actually one story featuring Bertie and Jeeves that is even older than those collected here. “Extricating Young Gussie,” first published in 1915 and included in The Man with Two Left Feet in 1917, finds Bertie tasked with preventing the marriage of his cousin to a chorus girl. I had thought it was safe to save this ’til later, since Jeeves’s part is extremely small, but Bertie mentioned it a couple of times here so I’ll probably go ahead and tackle that one next.

Filed Under: Books, General Fiction, Humor, Short Stories Tagged With:

Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: A

September 21, 2010 by 4 Comments

From the back cover:
A celebrated playwright and poet, Oscar Wilde also penned incomparable nonfiction and fiction—and lovely gem-like fairy tales. Filled with princes and nightingales, mermaids, giants, and kings, his tales carry the mark of his signature irony and subtle eroticism. This volume brings together all the stories found in Wilde’s two collections, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. Published here alongside their evocative original illustrations, these fairy tales, as Wilde himself explained, were written “partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.”

Review:
I was first made aware of the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde by Stephen Fry, whose recording of six of the stories is nothing short of delightful. This print edition has its charms, too, including three additional tales as well as illustrations and a great introduction that acquaints readers with not only the tragedies of Wilde’s life but with the fond recollections of his friends. I’d say it’s worthwhile to invest in both.

Wilde published two collections of children’s stories and both, obviously, are included here. On one level, the stories are amusing and imaginative, featuring a bevy of talking animals—whom Wilde often uses for satirical purposes, as with the mother duck in “The Devoted Friend” who frets that her children will never be in “the best society” unless they can stand on their heads—and even a sentient firework with delusions of grandeur. Often, though, a surprising degree of darkness is also present, as various characters die, realize the suffering they have caused others, commit valiant acts of self-sacrifice for ultimately no purpose whatsoever, and persist in their misguided ways despite the best attempts of others to show them the light.

In these stories, Wilde mingles the fantastic with the quotidian and the heartwarming with the bittersweet in a way that really appeals to me. Here are my three favorite examples (spoilers ahead):

In “The Nightingale and the Rose,” a nightingale overhears a student bewailing his plight: the woman he loves has agreed to dance with him at an upcoming event if he brings her a red rose. Alas, there are no red roses in his garden. The bird, believing him to be the very embodiment of true love, which she is always singing about, tries everything in her power to procure such a flower for him, ultimately deciding that it’s worth sacrificing her own life for the sake of love. And what is the recipient’s reaction to the rose when it is presented to her? “I’m afraid it will not go with my dress.” It ends up in the street and is promptly run over by a cart. The end.

A similarly awesome ending can be found in “The Star-Child.” One winter, a pair of poor woodcutters are returning to their homes when they see what appears to be a falling star land nearby. When they get there, they find a baby, and one of the men takes it home. The boy grows up fair and comely and becomes vain and cruel because he is convinced of his own lofty origins. One day, a beggar woman shows up to claim him as her son, but he rejects her. This action renders him ugly, and he spends the next three years in search of the woman to beg her forgiveness, learning mercy and pity along the way and sincerely repenting of his former actions. A happy ending seems imminent when he not only gets his looks back but is revealed to be a prince, but Wilde concludes the story (and A House of Pomegranates as a whole) with the following paragraph:

Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.

The end. Is that not amazing?

My very, very favorite story, though, is “The Happy Prince.” Once upon a time there was a prince, and he was happy while he lived in his isolated palace and remained ignorant of the world outside. After his death, the townspeople erected a beautiful, gilded statue in his honor and set it on a tall column, from where he can see (with his sapphire eyes) all the misery in the city that he could not see before. One day, a swallow—delayed in departing for warmer climes because of his devotion to a fickle reed (“It is a ridiculous attachment,” twittered the other swallows. “She has no money and far too many relations.”)—lands near his feet and becomes the messenger for the Happy Prince, plucking out his jewels and stripping off his gold and delivering them to the poor and needy.

The swallow eventually succumbs to the cold, but not before sharing a kiss with the statue he loves. The mayor, once he notices how shabby the statue has become, decides that one of himself would do much better and pulls it down. Here, instead of a wholly sad ending, Wilde offers up a sweeter alternative that sees both the statue and the bird rewarded for their benevolence. It’s an immensely satisfying tale that also portrays pure love between two males, though they be not human; I like it immensely.

The one author of whom I was reminded while reading these stories is Neil Gaiman. I’m now convinced he was at least partly inspired by Wilde, so, if you’re a fan of his short stories, you might like these as well!

Filed Under: Books, Children's Fiction, Classic, Fantasy, Short Stories Tagged With:

Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris: B-

September 19, 2010 by 15 Comments

From the back cover:
Cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse is on a streak of bad luck. First, her coworker is murdered and no one seems to care. Then she’s face-to-face with a beastly creature that gives her a painful and poisonous lashing. Enter the vampires, who graciously suck the poison from her veins (like they didn’t enjoy it).

Point is, they saved her life. So when one of the blood-suckers asks for a favor, she complies. And soon, Sookie’s in Dallas using her telepathic skills to search for a missing vampire. She’s supposed to interview certain humans involved. There’s just one condition: the vampires must promise to behave—and let the humans go unharmed. Easier said than done. All it takes is one delicious blonde and one small mistake for things to turn deadly…

Review:
The narrative of Living Dead in Dallas is constructed in a plot-within-a-plot sort of way, but neither the murder of Sookie’s vibrantly gay coworker, Lafayette, nor the fight against an anti-vampire cult is actually the most interesting aspect of the book.

The story begins when Lafayette’s body is found dumped in the car of a local cop. Suspicion falls on the attendees of a mysterious sex party he’d been bragging about attending, but before anything much can happen with the case, Sookie and Bill head off to Dallas to do a job for Eric, the head vamp of their region, which involves Sookie using her telepathic abilities to question humans who might have knowledge about a missing vampire named Farrell. She’s not too thrilled about it, but she did agree to perform such jobs for Eric on the condition that the humans involved come to no harm, and so she complies, however sulkily.

Really, there is not much by way of investigation here. Instead, they realize pretty quickly that a cult called The Fellowship of the Sun has nabbed the vamp and then Sookie and another human go undercover to learn the cult plans to have him “meet the dawn” in a public execution. Of course, Sookie is spotted for a snoop immediately and is imprisoned and nearly raped before she, and later Farrell, gets rescued. For something so full of action, it’s actually pretty dull.

However, it does lead to one of the most awesome scenes in the series so far when Bill breaks a promise to Sookie and kills one of the cultists who shot up the vampires’ celebration party. Her immediate reaction is great and I loved that she returned home and didn’t talk to him for three weeks. Unfortunately, the potential of this insurmountable obstacle in their relationship—Bill sometimes can’t help eating people!—is squandered, with the two of them reconciling with a bout of raunchy sex and a few words about how it’s his nature and she’s going to try to get used to it. Sigh. Color me disappointed.

After the missing vamp stuff is resolved, the story returns to the case of Lafayette. I’m a little fuzzy as to what actually happened first here—did the town residents launch their own sex club, which then attracted the attention of Callisto, the frenzy-provoking maenad, or was it her proximity that inspired them in the first place?—but it all leads to the second-best revelation of the book, which is that some of Bill’s descendants are alive and well in Bon Temps and that he is actually grateful for the opportunity to be able to assist them in some way. He might be a creature of the night, but as she puts it, the good in him is real.

Club Dead, coming soon!

Filed Under: Books, Supernatural Tagged With:

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham: A

September 3, 2010 by 2 Comments

From the back cover:
Lionized by literary society, Edward Driffield is married to his second wife, a woman of iron will, indisputable rectitude and great charm. Her request to Alroy Kear, lightweight novelist, to write a biography of her husband seems both flattering and agreeable. But on delving into Driffield’s past Kear revives the spectre of his first wife, Rosie, delectable companion of less respectable days and the unlikely muse of his greatest work.

In this novel Maugham has created the unauthorized biography, the book that cannot be written for fear of offending Driffield’s unsuspecting public. And in Rosie he has given us his greatest heroine, luscious, inconstant and commonplace, yet lingering most persistently in the mind.

Review:
Prior to reading Cakes and Ale, my exposure to W. Somerset Maugham was sorely limited. I first heard of him during my teen years in the context of “the guy who wrote the book that became the movie that starred Bill Murray in his first serious role.” (I was a bit of an SNL fanatic in those days.) After reading Cakes and Ale, I wonder what took me so long.

Cakes and Ale will possibly sound disorganized when described, but flows logically when read. The narrator, William Ashenden, is a middle-aged author who’s approached by a more commercially successful peer, Alroy Kear, to help with a biography Kear is writing. The subject is Edward Driffield, a novelist with whom Ashenden was acquainted when he (Driffield) was married to a vibrant but unfaithful former barmaid named Rosie, but who spent his later years with a respectable second wife who struggled for years to make him fit the mold of a venerated elder statesman of literature.

Despite Kear’s assertions that he wants to know everything that Ashenden has to tell about Driffield’s former marriage, Ashenden realizes that, with the second Mrs. Driffield backing the biography project, there’s no way any of it would be usable anyhow. The fact is, Driffield wrote better books when he was married to Rosie and though she was wildly unfaithful, it wasn’t done from malice. Rather than tell Kear what he wants to know, Ashenden instead reminisces privately about his awkward first meeting with the Driffields as a boy of fifteen—during which period he obediently adopted the class prejudice of the aunt and uncle with whom he lived—and the later resumption of their friendship when he is a 20-year-old medical student living in London.

Maugham’s writing style is especially appealing to me, managing to be clever, witty, insightful, and concise all at the same time. There aren’t words enough to express how much I adore the passages about young Ashenden. He’s so self-conscious and awkward, and I love how Maugham depicts Ashenden’s struggle between the warnings he’s received about working-class people versus what he is actually seeing for himself. It’s a nostalgic sort of portrait, fond and sympathetic, of a boy who gradually sheds the things he’s been led to believe and learns to think for himself. This isn’t the only portrait to be found, of course. Both Rosie and Kear are quite extensively developed, and the reaction of other characters to them also allows for some wry commentary on communities both rural and literary. Oddly enough, the least developed character is probably Driffield himself, about whom the biography is being written!

The only complaint I have about Cakes and Ale is that it’s too short! That’s not to say that the story is incomplete, for it isn’t, but I enjoyed the book so much I could have gone on reading it for thrice as long! Happily, Maugham wrote quite a few other things, one of which is waiting for me at the library and another of which is on its way from Amazon at this very moment.

Filed Under: Books, General Fiction Tagged With:
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