Green Eyed and Grim

Selina Lock Green Eyed and Grim (2013)
Time again for yet another eNovella account of the pulp-inspired adventures of Cody Quijano-Schell's Señor 105, a masked Mexican wrestler deriving strange and implausible powers from a variety of masks attuned to the elements of the periodic table - something roughly in the same direction as the Santo films, if perhaps a little weirder in places.

Green Eyed and Grim gets off to such a good start as to inspire anticipation of this being the best published thus far - a wrestling match at INAH, and enough detail to suggest that Selina Lock has either spent time in Mexico City or else just put an exceptionally goodly helping of elbow grease into the homework. She really captures the sense of place and atmosphere, presenting the welcome prospect of a Señor 105 tale set in Mexico, and which works with its setting. I'm not sure if I expected this or not, but only knowing of Selina Lock as a name associated with small press comics and Caption events, I probably did. To some extent I've lost touch with small press comics circles in recent years, but have retained a lasting impression of artists and writers doing what they do mainly because they care, rather than because they're trying to raise funds for yachts or face lifts; and also the fact that Selina seems to be a friend of the excellent and terribly underrated Lee Kennedy bodes well, I would suggest.

That said, I had some minor niggles - a mild tendency towards slightly repetitive paragraphs as the story went on, certain words reused over and over in consecutive sentences; also, as with previous eNovellas, there are those same formatting issues still screwing up the flow of the text - spaces missing between the end of one passage and another, paragraphs lacking indention, the random occurrence of incongruously left aligned sentences halfway through an otherwise justified paragraph and so on; but seriously these were for the most part minor distractions and no more pronounced than our cat Fluffy wanting to come in from the garden whilst I was trying to read and so doing this thing where he manically scratches at the window with both paws producing what sounds like some window guy drunk in charge of a squeegee.

The story ends up in Palenque - actually a hell of a lot more than a couple of hours drive from Mexico City, and in the east rather than the south, but these are minor details of a kind that possibly only a confirmed train spotter like myself would notice; and details which somehow work as possibly unintentional homage to the loosely built worlds inhabited by cinematic luchadors of the fifties and sixties; and frankly it's such a fucking relief to read a story which brings poor old King Pacal into the picture - himself being the one interred at Palenque - and gets it right; no creaky attempts to turn him into the pilot of an ancient spacecraft or any of that stupid crap.

Green Eyed and Grim is a thoroughly satisfying story with a good, sturdy plot, excellent pacing and impressive attention to detail; and you can buy it here.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (2007)
I initially found this volume of Moore's continuing revision of  characters from literary history into a single fictional continuum a wee bit underwhelming. Each block of narrative is punctuated with numerous pages of vaguely related text which somewhat disrupts the overall flow, not so much because comics necessarily make for easier reading than unalloyed prose but rather because page after comic book sized page of such small print can be quite off-putting. Additionally, it isn't always immediately obvious how these textual digressions relate to the rest of what's happening besides joining up a load of continuity for the sake of it.

However, my friend Steve suggested I persist with the book, pretend I'm on holiday, stuck in a caravan in the rain with only Black Dossier to keep me occupied. So I knuckled down and I'm sort of glad I did, although the five page stream of consciousness Kerouac pastiche was just a little too unreadable for my tastes, so I settled for the online summary which explained that, had I bothered to read it, I would have found it to be a canny exploration of the Burroughsian idea of language as a virus which itself relates directly to the theme of Black Dossier as a whole. Personally I think Moore would have been better off writing it as a direct pastiche of Burroughs, but never mind.

Anyway, this third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is enjoyable enough, although it really doesn't have a story so much as a sequence of events sagging under the weight of references to everything from Coronation Street to Dan Dare to Enid Blyton's Adventures of the Wishing Chair - imagine a washing line hung with the underwear of every fictional character ever to grace a page - although many of said references are quite obscure, requiring one to be looking in the right place at the right time. There's a danger of the story amounting to who would win in a fight between Cybermen and Klingons? although it's intent is clearly more ambitious even if it lacks overt expression. It seems significant that James Bond is here shown as a hero of the establishment: brutal, cowardly, misogynist and anti-intellectual - a revised Bulldog Drummond lacking even the honesty of said reactionary forebear - and hence the enemy and bowdlerisation of earlier, arguably more imaginative heroes and heroines. In this respect Black Dossier seems to be a criticism of the history of fiction itself, how that which once inspired the imagination has devolved to unit-shifting logos with moral content included only where it suits the genre. This may be how Moore viewed the mainstream movie adaptation of his first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, with all the finer points ironed out and homogenised for the big screen; and I'm probably not the first person to notice how many times James Bond gets his arse kicked in Black Dossier - unless the Sean Connery association is simply coincidence.

The conclusion, revealed in a line about Verne's Nautilus and Wells' cavorite inspiring submarines and rocket ships, would seem to be that there's no such thing as just a story, that it all comes back into our collective consciousness whilst perhaps also serving as barometer for the same, and that we should take a bit more care over the sort of stories we tell because fact and fiction tend to be related. Unfortunately I have a feeling this message may not be obvious unless you're looking for it, which it might be argued defeats the point of the message in terms of communicating to those who most need to hear it, but never mind.

Anyway, my second, more considered reading of Black Dossier was certainly more rewarding than the first, and the pastiches of William Shakespeare and P.G. Wodehouse were in particular a delight. Bit lumpy in places but undeniably nourishing.

A War of Witches

Timothy J. Knab A War of Witches (1993)
A slight shift in emphasis here, A War of Witches being anthropology written as autobiography rather than fiction as such. Back in 2006 when Mad Norwegian Press dropped the Faction Paradox imprint, I recall suggesting on some forum or other that Knab's book might be deemed to inhabit some of the same territory and might thus be of interest to those missing their not particularly regular dose of Factiony goodness; which I still stand by, particularly as A War of Witches had a considerable influence on my own more recent contribution to the mythos with Against Nature.

Timothy J. Knab is, as I understand it, a reasonably big name in the vague field falling somewhere between the anthropology and ethnography of Mesoamerica, and during the 1970s he spent time living amongst the indigenous people of rural Puebla, some miles east of the Valley of Mexico. To be specific, as he relates the tale he does a great deal more than just have a bit of a holiday in someone else's lack of facilities, making close friends with numerous Nahua families and himself becoming a curandero - which seems like pretty good going for a white guy living in a place with limited access to electricity and where it isn't even a given that your neighbour will speak Spanish.

As D.H. Lawrence observed in Apocalypse, written in 1931: In the lowest stratum of society religion remains pretty much the same, throughout the ages, and so it is in Knab's Sierra de Puebla where the pre-Hispanic religion remains pretty much unchanged despite the garnish of a few obscure saints - so obscure as to be unknown outside the region. In other words, whilst the cathedrals of indigenous Mexican faith may have been bulldozed five hundred years ago, there are still places where they never got the memo.

What makes this account potentially so fascinating to those who may not be familiar with the culture for which it gives vivid account, is that it approaches the supernatural Nahua world on its own terms - getting right in there without the lab coat or attendant rationale which would reduce the subject to a sterile itinerary of quaint rural customs; and happily, neither does Knab adopt any approach in common with the new-age types who might mistakenly imagine themselves somehow attuned to the Nahua way of life. Rather, he lets the people and their beliefs speak for themselves, and in terms which no-one should find impenetrable or unfamiliar.

In learning the curandero's art and uncovering the genuinely terrifying history of witchcraft in the Sierra de Puebla, Knab recovers such detail of obscure potions, rites performed in certain caves, methods of killing foes without detection, and dream interpretation as to force the conclusion that calling this stuff mumbo jumbo is missing the point, because it's absolutely real for those involved. There are plenty of great books full of names and dates with regard to indigenous Mexican history, but this one attempts to tell you what it actually felt like as Knab spends afternoons idly sipping coffee or cane alcohol with scary old people who make veiled references to witchcraft murders, what the things under the ground want, and a recent crucifixion that no-one likes to talk about for obvious reasons.

Whilst I have a lot of time for Dicky Dawkins, and tend to agree with his attitude to that which is lazily termed spirituality, A War of Witches highlights the flaw in his somewhat reductionist view of religion. It would be easy to dismiss that which Knab encountered as a combination of suggestion and sleight of hand, except such dismissal presupposes certain conditions which aren't entirely applicable and that there is nothing to be learnt here - which is far from the case. Of all the books I've absorbed on this subject, A War of Witches is one of the most illuminating and makes for genuinely gripping reading.

Galactic Pot-Healer

Philip K. Dick Galactic Pot-Healer (1968)
Like one of those rare concoctions thrown together from whatever you've found left in the fridge and which turns out to be delicious, this reads like an assemblage of material that Dick had laying around all crudely mashed together to form, against all probability, something wonderful. A few years earlier he'd written a children's book called Nick and the Glimmung - which was entertaining but you can see why it failed to find a publisher, being sort of a literary equivalent to the clown at a children's party undergoing a sudden and spectacular acid freak-out. Galactic Pot-Healer recycles a fair bit of Nick and the Glimmung, throwing in Dick's brief flirtation with pottery - which I'm almost certain I read about somewhere although I can't seem to find the reference at the moment - along with certain vaguely Gnostic ideas that had begun to emerge from his fiction in more overt form as precursor to novels like VALIS and The Divine Invasion.

Of all his novels, Galactic Pot-Healer seems unusually focussed considering all the layered symbolism of its conclusion, benefiting from following a single character for the duration of the narrative. This single character is Joe Fernwright who heals pots, restoring them to original form by means that owe more to dream imagery than science. Joe, one of Dick's archetypal blue collar heroes, is recruited by an oddly well-spoken Lovecraftian entity called the Glimmung who hopes to raise an ancient cathedral from the ocean depths of a distant planet. The conclusion - with the ocean representing a world in decay, the customary twin embodiments of good and evil, and the allusions to a mad God who has forsaken his creation - is about as clear as it ever was in any of Dick's later works, but it's nonetheless engrossing trying to figure it all out, and not least thanks to a well-developed sense of humour.

Dick doesn't exactly tell jokes, but his wit is as dry as you could possible require, and his sense of the absurd really makes this novel. Even during the climatic battle of the last chapters, the Godlike being at the heart of the struggle still communicates with polite notes sent from the ocean bed in bottles and signed cordially - Glimmung. Of all the Dick novels I've read, this one reminds me a little of Clifford D. Simak - or at least those elements which aren't conspicuously Dickian remind me of Simak in terms of pace and the wonderful reportage of the completely ridiculous as just something that happens from time to time. Not so ambitious as some, but still one of his best.

Mind of My Mind

Octavia E. Butler Mind of My Mind (1977)
It seems fair to say that black female science-fiction writers are fairly thin on the ground, and since Octavia Butler passed on in 2006, they've been sadly thinner on the ground to the tune of one, although I say that not so much for the sake of ticking any particular diversity box as the simple fact of her having been a fairly exceptional author and someone who really should have achieved wider recognition than she did.

Mind of My Mind was her second novel, and second of a series telling a much larger story spanning thousands of years in the lives of a roughly dynastic breed of telepaths. It's probably not what you would call hard science-fiction - as if that really matters - and oddly, it reminds me a little of Chris Claremont's New Mutants comic back when Bill Sienkiewicz was drawing thoughtful tales of young people struggling with weird powers, a book that had strayed a long way from standard superhero pastures, although then of course some idiot invented Rob fucking Liefeld and everything turned to shit. The details of the tale, the actual story onto which Mind of My Mind is bolted isn't that remarkable and, it might be argued, was later done to greater effect in Stephen Baxter's Coalescent; but Butler had a wonderfully persuasive narrative voice, a pleasantly gritty blue collar feel which was nevertheless able to convey subtle points without any of the usual showing off or ham-fisted allegorising one might expect of a novel such as this. In other words, she drew on her experience as a black woman without trading on her ethnicity as a virtue in itself, thus allowing for the sort of  communication of ideas which can sometimes be a problem with novels wherein such issues are raised.

Mind of My Mind is quite complex in terms of subject, being about relationships, power and coercion. Whilst some ideas regarding slavery enter the equation, there's much more going on here, with a dynamic in which the owned are simply obliged to accept their servitude to a master who seems at times quite likeable. There's no dramatic breaking of chains in the face of a scowling despot, nothing so obvious to intrude or detract from what is actually being said; and what Butler may have been saying is probably up to individual reader. I've seen this book criticised for raising issues and then failing to deal with them, but this strikes me as a basic misunderstanding, the assumption that a black woman writer is necessarily obliged to make bold, shouty statements just in case any of us had failed to realise that racism is bad, like in one of those stories where we set down the book and exclaim to ourselves hang on, these poor robots are being treated just like they used to treat the slaves!

I think my only criticism of Mind of My Mind is that the voice of the narrator is significantly more engaging than that of any of the subsidiary characters, all of whom get their fifteen minutes, but it's nevertheless a great book.

The Shaver Mystery book three

Richard S. Shaver The Shaver Mystery book three (2011)
Back in the 1940s, Richard Shaver delighted and probably also confused readers of Amazing Stories with his tales of a world hidden below the ground, a network of caves and tunnels spanning the globe inhabited by mysterious and terrible creatures of which the worst were almost certainly the Dero. These tunnels had once been inhabited by advanced beings, since gone to live elsewhere in the galaxy, unfortunately leaving the degenerate Dero to make fiendish use of their ray devices. Shaver's intention was to expose the truth of the Dero training these ray devices on surface dwellers causing train wrecks, spontaneous human combustion, disappearances, voices in the head and so on. The Dero, he insisted, were not only motivated almost entirely by evil, but they were also real, described in his fictionalised accounts in the pages of a science-fiction periodical because the truth was simply too shocking for any other avenue, besides which, even if he was stark raving mad, he wasn't an idiot and knew full well that he would be laughed at.

The thing is, Richard Shaver was almost certainly a deeply-troubled man suffering from serious mental illness of the kind that rationalises voices in one's head as the work of ray operators at work deep below the earth; so I don't think I'm ever quite going to square any pleasure I might derive from his writing with the suspicion that he was something of a carnival attraction for Ray Palmer, his publisher. Then again, I wasn't there so I don't know, and perhaps it did him good to churn out page after page of this stuff.

Much as I dislike the term, there's good cause to regard Shaver's tales - of which two lengthy examples are featured here - as outsider art (as are the paintings he produced in later life) although that shouldn't be taken to indicate that he necessarily lacked literary distinction. On the contrary, some of his writing is astonishing and weirdly compelling:

She slipped to the floor beside the terrible dignity of the God throne, and the scene of her last deed in life did honor even to the awesomely sculptured chamber of ancient honor and striving. For Sarah strove in her hate, and died so, trying to do right. The gross horror crouched on the God throne was dead, and the sculpted faces looked down on Sarah as she died with their stony approval not incongruous.

Okay, so I'm not saying it's Shakespeare, but it does much more than just roll out the customary shite of some tosspot having adventures and making observations grinningly as hacked out in the relentlessly unambitious efforts of certain authors I wish I'd never bothered reading. It's endlessly melodramatic in those same gritted teeth terms of A.E. van Vogt, with the tone of some bizarre hybrid of Ben Hur and Cocteau's Orphée, and as serious as a matter of life and death which the author clearly believed appropriate as he delivered these warnings about the people downstairs. The only real problem is that it seems Shaver had his good days and his bad days, and longer tales such as are printed here tended to get a bit scrambled as his brain worked through the stranger psychic excesses of his unfortunate condition. They're still worth reading for some of the imagery, and the narrative is usually roughly coherent beneath all the peculiar digressions; and even with all that taken into account, both The Masked World and Thought Records of Lemuria make more sense than William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer so, you know... 

This is published by Armchair Fiction who can be found here, by the way...

Señor 105 and the Secret Santa

Stuart Douglas Señor 105 and the Secret Santa (2012)
I know it's probably a bit late to be reviewing such a season specific eNovella, but then I'm sure I've seen Simpsons Christmas specials broadcast in June, and I need a bit of a break - something short, light and a bit sugary after a sleepless night interrupted by, amongst other things, Junior requiring a glass of water at 4AM having apparently failed to realise that being nine years old he is now expected to be able to operate a fucking electric light switch and turn a tap under his own steam.

Cody Quijano-Schell's Señor 105, in the event of anyone not being aware of the character, is a masked Mexican wrestler who engages in peculiar adventures drawing elemental power from his various masks and alchemical tattoos, assisted by a small boy and a talking balloon; and this one's about a fight between Father Christmas and the Devil, kind of...

In the improbable event of this description not being in itself sufficient to inspire your interest, Señor 105 and the Secret Santa is the fourth in an ongoing series of hypothetically bi-monthly eNovellas working roughly like a regular comic but without pictures. Stuart Douglas takes the series in the direction of what feels almost like magic realism - or what I imagine I might have found had I ever knowingly read any magic realism - with a touch of Morcambe and Wise Christmas Special for no reason I can quite identify. I have to say it felt a little rushed in places, but there's always something quite solid and satisfying about Stuart Douglas's writing - even if there's an odd word that jars, it always feels as though it's built up from a well-laid foundation, and this eNovella is no exception. I found the events around the middle of the tale a little muddled in places, and my inner-anthropologist spent some time mumbling about Mexican villages which appeared to be situated in the Andes - but it all comes together beautifully at the end. Short, satisfying, and the kind of story which wouldn't really work so well with any other character in the driving seat, excepting possibly Bill Griffiths' Zippy the Pinhead.

And you can download it here for free.