A decent collection of space and sci-fi based short stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Like many anthologies, it’s uneven. I was on the verge of giving up after the first few–the writing seemed awkward and unpolished–but I’m glad I stuck with it, as I ended up finding several stories that satisfied the itch for the dark, weird and cosmic.
Favorites included:
Ada Hoffman’s “Harmony Amid the Stars,” a spooky tale of long-haul transit through the whispering regions of space.
Dan Webb’s “The Comet Called Ithaqua,” offered a nice, eerie “toxic house” tale.
Pamela Rentz’s “Lottie vs. the Moon Hopper” offered a strong working-class voice in a creepy space station.
Orrin Grey’s “The Labyrinth of Sleep” offered a slow, mysterious build as we navigate a dreamscape, something difficult to do well.
Sean Craven’s “Deep Blue Dreams” offered a spooky, narcotic tale of jellies and bliss.
With “Birds of Maine,” comics creator Michael DeForge puts forth an off-kilter masterpiece. This extensive graphic novel follows the general format of a daily strip, with four panels and (typically) a gag to close. But it’s delightfully colorful and weird. Better, the panels gradually cohere into a larger journey of creation and self-discovery.
Our primary character is Ginni, a young cardinal. She has a supportive family, friends that she forms a band with and a dream of being a fashion designer (despite the fact that birds don’t wear clothes). She lives in a bird colony on the moon, a utopian, quasi-Marxist place, colonized long ago and now in distant contact with the humans (and birds) of Earth.
Things are pretty good on the moon. Birds there have a fungal computer network with which they can communicate, a “universal worm” to sustain them and ample polycules and bird orgies (along with a general “live and let live” attitude). Among this abundance, though, Ginni has to go through the young-person’s journey of self-discovery, figuring out who exactly she is and what role she should play.
DeForge uses his bird utopia to satirize life on Earth. Even with the help of the best bird historians, his cast can’t quite get a grasp on the need to work, health insurance or being forced to stay with your family of birth. Despite the political undertones of his avian perspective here, DeForge doesn’t come off as judgy or preachy. His birds have a sense of humor about themselves and are perfectly capable of being ridiculous when called for. Sections about human society are balanced with a well-placed F bomb or bird breeding joke.
The story doesn’t stay static. Ginni becomes pen pals with an Earth-based bird fan. A human astronaut drops in (although she’s more hung up on her ex-boyfriend than committed to any cross-species connection). But the story is a slow build, with the characters and their reactions to one another taking the forefront.
DeForge’s art is beautiful throughout. Colorful, wiggly and almost psychedelic, it uses the whole palate to convey the range of bird colors and types. He adapts a cartoony shorthand for most of the characters, rendering them as a simple configuration of shapes–more like flowers than birds. But his reduction of form makes the characters memorable and distinct, even as DeForge occasionally zooms in for more detailed depictions of angry swans and fungal networks.
“Birds of Maine” is a difficult work to describe, but it’s wonderful to experience. Thoughtful, playful and artistic, it’s an accomplishment to behold.
“The thing that sucks about trying to live in the moment is that you end up broke and hungover when you wake up tomorrow.”
Direct and down to earth, Colin Clancy’s “Ski Bum” follows ski enthusiast Jimmy as he drops out of college in Michigan to head out west to chase the big slopes of Colorado. Aimless and romantic in an understated, blue-collar kind of way, Jimmy is looking for more than fresh powder. He wants to live life, to chase new experiences, even as he discovers how tough that can be on a part-time ski instuctor’s budget.
Living in workers’ quarters, Jimmy falls in with a crew of friends and quickly settles into a service-job routine: shots at night, the monotony of teaching rich kids to ski in the mornings, and stealing moments on the slopes whenever he can. Uncomplicated without being simple (just like Clancy’s writing style), Jimmy seeks basic pleasures alongside the more difficult work of determining who exactly he wants to be.
That’s when he’s sober. When he’s partying, Jimmy can turn into someone else entirely–throwing his phone into a snowbank after a screaming match with his girlfriend or wading into a bar fight for the thrill of it. But he’s not the worst drunk in a party scene full of them, and Clancy does his strongest work capturing several hellish bacchanalias, the kinds of bleary binges that render the next morning into slush under your boots.
The group’s excursion to New Orleans is a particular lowlight, taking what’s supposed to be a fun party weekend and transforming it into something hateful and queasy, half-riot, half-purge. The characters are still young enough that it’s fun for them to tie one on and get out of control; I’m much older than they are now, and reading Clancy’s book, I couldn’t help but worry for them, seeing the trouble on the horizon.
But the book reminds us they’re still young enough to make mistakes, to flounder, and to bounce back. “Ski Bum” does a memorable job capturing a slice of youth in a special place. The characters aren’t sure what they’re doing, but they don’t have to be quite yet–they still have time to bum around a while before shifting back to conventional lives, finishing school, getting real jobs.
It’s unclear how things will turn out for these characters, but the easy read rewards us for the time we spend with them.
McGrath is a thoughtful guide. He’s open enough to enjoy the pleasures of Elvis impersonators and church-basement wrestling matches, but he’s mindful of the depths beneath: a friend stabbed by his own brother in Lesotho, a homeless client embarking on one last bender as he fades out of life.
The author is open with his sympathies. He calls out a racist mine manager who invites him to watch a rugby match and chews out hospital workers who judge his client for turning back to cocaine on a terminal diagnosis. It’s easy to agree with McGrath, but while it’s understandable he doesn’t extend the same graciousness to his foes as his friends, it also feels like a missed opportunity in essays of this caliber. As he notes, he drank the mine manager’s beer, ate his food…and waited until they’d parted ways to write an essay calling out the man’s racism.
That said, the stories here are warm and memorable. Perhaps the standout is “Keyhole to Sana’a,” which shares how a sister-in-law’s lost iPhone made its way to Yemen, where it offered a window into a different world via photos uploaded by a teenage boy into a shared iCloud account. McGarth turns a personal connection into a geopolitical one, delicately linking the threads between this boy’s life and the civil war that may have consumed him. It’s a sensitive story carefully told, one that’s well at home in this excellent collection.
Quotes
“Elvis is a stocky First National man with a thick watermelon gut, thick gold sunglasses, thick black pomp. Very quickly he is sweating hard, aiming for verisimilitude that would make the King proud. His pipes are rich baritone and listening to him is an experience not unlike being rubbed in butter.”
“Come Friday night, the two of us stormed into the Legion, hot for combat. We swept past the horseshoe bar and into the packed community hall, the crowd adorned in flannel, camo, blaze orange, plaid, and Carhartt, all the shades of Minnesota’s rainbow.”
“Professional wrestling occupies a sui generis space in the culture, a strange nexus where “Star Wars”-quoting nerds and juiced-up gym rats might share space together and may in fact be the same person. It is one of the unique American artforms, like jazz, or comic books, or endowing corporations with the legal rights of people.”
“I think you have to have language to have craziness…you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.”
Those words, spoken in psychiatric care by Alicia Western, seem to be a key point Cormac McCarthy is getting at with “Stella Maris.” A smaller companion novel to “The Passenger,” the book takes place entirely in dialogue, offering transcriptions of talk-therapy sessions between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen.
Alicia is not well. Just twenty, she has visions. She barely eats. She’s just fled the bedside of her brother, a race-car driver who’s suffered an accident in Europe that has left him in a coma, one that has doctors pleading with her to pull the plug. She’s also a math genius, someone who seems barely tethered to this world. The daughter of a Manhattan Project scientist, Alicia is the possessor of an intellect so vast that the problems she pictures when she closes her eyes–topography and systems–feel more real than the painful detritus of our everyday world.
Mentally ill, Alicia remains intelligent, dark and funny. She has checked herself into care at Stella Maris, the facility that gives the book its name, but she doesn’t seem optimistic about getting better. She likes to talk, though, about mathematicians and growing up in Wartburg, Tennessee and the illusions and delusions we sell ourselves. McCarty does a masterful job of weaving the dialogue between doctor and patient into something engrossing, an illumination of her particular world, even if Alicia suspects it may just be a shoddy projection.
“Stella Maris” engages several of McCarthy’s abiding themes: the problem of evil, a lurking sense of malign intent in the universe, a hermitage of the soul–a leave-taking of mores–for those shaken by these deeper truths. “My guess is you can only be so happy,” Alicia says at one point. “While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.”
What’s new in this latest pair of novels is a focus on mathematics. Where McCarthy’s books once covered the terrain of horses and killers, here we get Godel and Gauss, topology and gauge theory. It never makes much sense to me, but it sounds credible in Alicia’s voice. McCarthy succeeds in building her up as an untethered genius.
That brings us to Alicia’s other issue, a secret she doesn’t want to talk about at first but one that seems to compel her to keep participating in these sessions. She’s in love with her brother, Bobby. Romantically. She told him as much, threw herself at him. But even while he seemed to feel the same–in her eyes, at least–he rejected the possibility of a future together, one she would have been happy to embrace.
Why does McCarthy introduce this element, both here and in “The Passenger”? In part, it may be to underscore that Alicia is genuinely detached. It would be easy to view her as “the real sane one,” a troubled truthteller, but the element of incest only underscores how bereft and alien she is.
McCarthy also invests much of his work with a Biblical heft and cadence, and incest is an element there as well, something bizarre and otherworldly, conjuring the mysteries of Abraham and Lot. McCarthy has introduced the topic in other works, notably “Outer Dark” but also “Child of God.” It’s certainly unnerving.
There’s a compact most of us live with, McCarty seems to say, but there are those who step outside it. That applies to math, and that applies to other things as well.
“I just thought we would always be together,” Alicia says near the end of the novel. “I know you think I should have seen that as more aberrant than I did, but my life is not like yours.”
Quotes
“…I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.”
“I don’t have any politics. And I’m pacifist to the bone. Only a nation can make war–in the modern sense–and I don’t like nations. I believe in running away. Much as you’d step out of the path of an oncoming bus. If we’d had a child, I would take it to where war seemed least probable. Although it’s hard to outguess history.”
“We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war.”
“Yes. Well, it’s probably like bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war won’t arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.”
“Psychiatrists have trouble dealing with the unconscious in a straightforward way. But the unconscious is a purely biological system, not a magical one. It’s a biological system because that’s all there is for it to be. People aren’t happy talking about the unconscious unless there’s a certain amount of hokum involved. But there isn’t. The unconscious is simply a machine for operating an animal. What else could it be?”
