Tag Archive for 'folk tales'

Awful Dreck: Baltimore by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

Baltimore by Mike Mignola and Christopher GoldenUsually I write up a fat, juicy little intro to my reviews, but today I’m going to cut to the chase. Baltimore SUCKED! Here’s what I think happened: A very talented artist who does some very cool and goofy things got it into his head to write something serious and fumbled the genre he chose. Or something like that.

The setup: Three men with haunted pasts are summoned to a cursed town by soldier-turned-vampire hunter, Lord Henry Baltimore. Baltimore has been searching for a vampire king in order to avenge the loss of his family and wife to the scourge. The three men will join in the battle for Baltimore’s very soul and spirit. The book is illustrated throughout with drawings by the very talented Mike Mignola. Readers may remember Mignola from the Hellboy series and The Amazing Screw-On Head, among other things. Here’s more information about Christopher Golden, who I am unfamiliar with.

What’s good about Baltimore? Vampires, adventures on the dark side, and one good story (out of 4) about a haunting. I think that the book aspires to be something interesting and unique. To me, it hearkens back to some older adventure fiction, and has a kind of steampunk sensibility. For instance, it has something of the flavor of Jules Verne novels like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or Wells’ War of the Worlds. (Except that, unlike those books, it sucks). It has adventure, travel, and moral fortitude.

What’s not so good about Baltimore? I was reminded of Moby Dick, of all things, but probably not for the reason you’re thinking. When I read Moby Dick, I was like “It’s halfway through the book and the ship hasn’t sailed and we’re reading about a pastor!” The book is practically over before anything really happens. The first part of the book tells how Lord Baltimore becomes the sworn enemy of the vampires. The second part of the book consists of the three men swapping tales of their own brushes with the supernatural. The third part gets you somewhat caught up with what Baltimore has been doing recently, in epistolary format. Finally, the fourth part of the book is the showdown between the vampire king and Baltimore (and his henchmen).

What sucks about Baltimore? Dull, two-dimensional, interchangeable characters; a vampire hunting hero with a jointed wooden leg who carries dumb vampire-hunting gear; a vampire novel with absolutely no eroticism or even titillation; no meaningful female characters at all; mechanical writing; a weird thing in the beginning about toy soldiers that doesn’t really figure into the rest of the book.

Let’s see those numbers.

Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 1 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 0 out of 5

Final result: Because of Mignola, the artwork, and the subject matter, this book jumped off the shelf at me and demanded to be read. Finishing it ended up being a dull chore, and I am especially bitter because I expected better. Guys! Guys! Don’t bother writing a vampire novel without any eroticism. You might as well just make it about werewolves or something. Don’t get me wrong – I like werewolves. Some of my best friends are werewolves, but they’re not sexy like vampires.

Baltimore by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden – Bantam Books – 2007
DON’T Buy Baltimore at Amazon

Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. See you next time!

Published on July 29, 2010 in Book Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Book Review: Snake Agent by Liz Williams

Snake Agent by Liz WilliamsTo retrieve his wife, a man journeys to hell. How many more times can this tale be told? It’s almost like a band choosing to cover Stairway to Heaven. It has been told perfectly a few times. Countless other writers have tried their hand at it, and most have failed. When I see a man-goes-to-hell-to-retrieve-his-wife story coming, I think to myself. “This better be good.”

Fortunately, it is. I love this book! It begins the way a normal detective novel does, with a vaguely downtrodden detective, Detective Chen. Detective Chen tries not to be cynical. As his police department’s “snake agent”, Chen is in charge of dealing with supernatural crimes. He is brought into a case involving a wealthy woman who has found that her daughter’s soul ended up in hell instead of heaven. Hoping for a simple bureaucratic mix-up, Chen investigates and discovers that someone is trading in souls. Soon he uncovers a conspiracy that may lead straight to the emperor of hell himself.

There are many charming things about this book. Not the least of which is the matter-of-fact way the book lays out its own internal mythology. For example, when asked about what happens when you die, Detective Chen tells it like it is: Souls take a journey through regions with names like the Sea of Night and the Night Harbor on their way to the afterlife, where they are processed by the bureaucratic departments of heaven or hell and then eventually reincarnated. Along the way they are shown their past life, what they will most likely be reincarnated as, and given a special drink which makes them forget everything before they are shuttled back to the living. It is in this sort of play that the book excels.

My only real complaint is that there are too many dues ex machinas. I personally enjoy a dues ex machina here or there, but when there are too many, I think it can be a suspense killer. On the other hand, I enjoyed that conventional detective fiction characters abound in Snake Agent. There is the oafish sergeant, the rogue cop, the captain who is beholden to local politics, and the vaguely threatened detective’s wife. Once the book builds up steam and really kicks into gear, though, a lot of these conventions are broken or twisted. For example, the detective’s wife goes from being vaguely threatened to being on an adventure of her own, and the rogue cop turns out to be a more complex character than one would expect. The book eventually stops being a detective novel and turns into a fantastic journey through hell.

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 5 out of 5

Final result: Great adventure, Chinese mythology, evil alchemists, soul trading, great cover art… This book has it all! Mmmmmm. Fans of dark fantasy such as Clive Barker’s Imajica will be excited to get their hands on some intelligent writing. Fans of detective fiction will be gratified to find a new series of novels with a fresh twist on the genre. The story is ancient, the plotting is Shakespearean, the humor is thick, and it’s a real page-turner. I love this book! I am simultaneously excited and scared to read the next one.

Snake Agent by Liz Williams – Night Shade Books – 2005
Get Snake Agent on Amazon

Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. See you next time!

Published on December 15, 2009 in Book Reviews. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Travel Abroad for Monsters

KUNIYOSHI Earth Spider One

This week’s Weekly Geeks topic is travel around the world. Before I can even get into the topic, a little discussion is necessary. You see, traveling is especially complicated for monsters. Yes. Yes. Regular readers are saying “But you keep talking about all these underground tunnels and secret passageways that go from attic to attic through thin air. What about those?” And you’re perfectly correct. Some monsters are fortunate enough to have a secret tunnel or a relative in a country they’re interested in and can make such arrangements. For other monsters, however, things are more complicated. Let’s go through the basics.

Travel for Monsters

World travel has never been very straight-forward for monsters. Although monsters of all kinds enjoyed more freedom and ease of travel during the 20th Century, things have been getting more difficult. Let’s look at the most common forms of transport.

Prohibitions Against Transporting Evil Over Moving Water: Among trivia about monsters, this isn’t one of the more popularly known facts, but almost all forms of evil and many kinds of monster cannot safely pass over moving water. In the case of evil, there aren’t really many options available, especially for really really ridiculously bad forms of evil. However, restrictions aren’t as harsh for monsters, and many monsters who are affected can apply for a temporary exemption.

Airplane Travel: In case you haven’t noticed, recently it’s become harder and harder to get onto an airplane, especially for beings that are so hideous they have to wear a mask in public, or things with multiple arms or tentacles. Monsters with sharp appendages over three inches long can forget it. In fact, air travel is no longer an option for all but a few lucky monsters who possess ID and can pass for human through a metal detector, airline customer service counter (without eating anyone, mind you) and for however long the flight is. Monsters with stinky food or who need fluids to feed on should eat just before their flight.

Unscrupulous Shipping Companies and Ship Captains: The difficulty with air flights leads us to what is unfortunately the most common avenue left to most monsters today, and that is being smuggled abroad on a ship. While it can be dangerous, there are hidden perks. While such luminaries as Dracula traveled with his rats in a crate in the ship’s hold, today’s smuggled monster should consider paying extra for a nook with a window. Beware: When dealing with unscrupulous shippers, it’s easy to get stranded in the country of your destination. Never pay the full round-trip fee up front! Finally, be sure to pack enough to eat because sailors have a long and storied history of killing monsters who decide to eat them.

Travel by Giant Flying Creature, Magic, or Giant Sea Monster: This more traditional mode of transport has been gaining in popularity of late, but is extremely dangerous. Travelers should be wary of any larger monster offering suspiciously low discount fares. Unfortunately some huge monsters advertise in order to secure meals. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. With giant ocean-going beasts, in most cases you will have to trust that the monster will disgorge you at your destination, and it is much harder to secure round trips. As for magic, it is usually either available via Faeries and thus ridiculously complicated and/or dangerous, or it involves some magical instrument such as a flying carpet or broom. These last two are agonizingly slow for world travel.

Travel by Sea Monster is Often Uncomfortable

Travel by Sea Monster is Often Uncomfortable

Where in World I Have Been

Personally, besides two horrifying trips to the Land of Faery (don’t ask) and a very brief stay in Hell, I have managed to make it to Japan, and Bali, Indonesia. Japan, of course, has famous monsters and a long tradition of ghost stories. The best known author of the subject is Lafcadio Hearn, who collected many Japanese folk takes and preserved them in English during the late 19th Century. Some of his stories were later turned into film, most notably in Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan.

(Lafcadio Hearn and Kwaidan – Criterion Collection on Amazon)

The one thing you notice immediately about Japanese ghost stories is that the Japanese have taken revenge from beyond the grave to a whole new level. Sure there are plenty of instances of old hags who murder children to supply deranged noblemen with fresh blood. What is remarkable, however, is that even the slightest deviation from the norm or even the tiniest social error can result in death, disaster, or losing one’s ears. To an American monster, it almost seems as if Japanese monsters and ghosts have been assigned the task of not only defending the country from giant moths, but also enforcing their social mores and taboos.

Vengeful Ghost Fulfilling a Social Obligation

A Sorrowful Ghost Fulfilling Her Social Obligation

While I was in Japan I got the opportunity to ask some of my hosts if that was the case. Most of them gave the sort of answers you might expect. They said that back in the old days, enforcing social taboos and mores was The Way Things Were Done. They also said that there are more traditional monsters and ghosts who still follow the old ways. So, for instance, the ghost of a maid might still choose to haunt a cruel man who threw her down a well because of a misunderstanding over a missing dish. In other cases, however, many of the younger monsters and ghosts are more free-spirited, and might choose to haunt or horrify just because they feel like it.

While we’re on the subject of Japanese monsters, don’t forget to visit the blog of my friend Jerom, who has designed some Japanese monster papercraft. Here are a few examples: Phantom Samurai – Karakasa – Namahage.

Phantom Samurai Papercraft

Well, that’s it for today. I hope this information proves useful to any other monsters out there who are thinking about taking a trip abroad. You should do it if you can. It may be a lot of trouble, but it’s totally worth it. Thanks for stopping by! See you next time.

Published on July 12, 2009 in Memes and Uncategorized. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Book Review: Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

Kelly Link Pretty Monsters 2008I’m excited because it’s only once in a great while that I discover an author who I want to follow. By “follow” I don’t mean it in the traditional monster-wise sense of the word as in “to stalk, with the intent of rending limb from limb” or even the new more socially-conscious but still monster-specific “to appear suddenly as if from nowhere and bury a hatchet into after having pretended to be dead or no longer interested.” (How, I ask, did the world get so complicated?)  To get back to the topic – by “follow” I mean to scan new release announcements and news for her name like I do with Susanna Clarke. I felt that way about Kelly Link about a quarter of the way through this book. Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link:

The wizards of Perfil are lazy and useless. They hate to climb stairs and they never listen when you talk. They don’t answer questions because their ears are full of beetles and wax and their faces are wrinkled and hideous. Marsh fairies live deep in the wrinkles of the faces of the wizards of Perfil and the marsh fairies ride around in the bottomless canyons of the wrinkles on saddle-broken fleas who grow fat grazing on magical, wizardly blood. The wizards of Perfil spend all night scratching their fleabites and sleep all day. I’d rather be a scullery maid than a servant of the invisible, doddering, nearly blind, flea-bitten, mildewy, clammy-fingered, conceited marsh-wizards of Perfil.

This description of the mysterious Wizards of Perfil is so many flavors of awesome I don’t even know where to start. Pretty Monsters is a collection of nine stories by Kelly Link. The target audience of this book is young adults, although I think that in most of the stories, there’s enough here that an adult could get into them as well. As it usually goes with collections, there is enough variety that most people will find something they like.

The Wrong Grave - The wrong grave sets the tone of the collection very well. This being: Whatever you were expecting when you picked up this book, you were mistaken. This story, like all the rest of the stories in the book, is wildly imaginative, entertaining, and unconventional. Although the story begins as a portrait of puppy love gone awry, and seems to be about a boy who is making some serious mistakes, it ends up being more of a tale about how people change and grow over time, and how that process is mysterious. This amazingly short, very simple story is built on a very deep truth and has something important to say about the nature of love and humanity (not that I would know much about that because I’m A MONSTER.) I bet that sounds like I’m overstating the case, but after reading this story my expectations for the book went many notches higher.

The Wizards of Perfil – Another really amazing story about the nature of love and our personal interactions. This story is insanely imaginative, and reads very much like how Jorge Luis Borges might update an authentic Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Two of the reviewers on the back cover of this book compare Link to Borges, and I think the comparison is fair.

Magic for Beginners – Also very reminiscent of Borges, but even more so of Douglas Adams, in that it is endlessly imaginative. Each page of this story has several ideas that could each be their own story. Magic for Beginners is about some teenage fans of a TV show that may or may not be real. The story includes a poignant teenage love triangle and the marital troubles of the protagonist’s parents. Both relationships are presented with the complexity and depth that they would have in real life. Add to this an unending imaginative discourse on the TV show and its characters, and you’ve got Magic for Beginners.

The Faery Handbag – Another contemporary take on a classic subject. This was good, but I think it could have used some more humor, or some more darkness.

The Specialist’s Hat – The scariest story of the lot, this is a ghost story in the best tradition of M.R. James. It is a short, sweet, and richly complex tale about the mysterious fate of two little girls who are sisters. The reader is left having to make up their mind who the real ghosts in the story were, who is lost, and who is saved. I loved this story. It’s the best thing I’ve read so far this year, and could end up being the champion of 2009. As a bonus, this story can be imagined with Edward Gorey characters and settings.

Monster – A very strangely conventional but absurd summer camp monster tale. Complete with bullying kids and lots of blood.

The Surfer – Cyberpunk dystopian cautionary tale of a plague-ridden future but populated with teenagers and a UFO abduction paperback guru. A tad slow but still interesting and with a wholly unexpected ending.

The Constable of Abal – Again another complex and fascinating tale about the nature of love, fate, and how we perceive one another. Especially how these perceptions can change or how the people we love can possess hidden potentialities. A witch/con-artist mother and her daughter, both of whom can summon and trap ghosts, are forced to leave town when the mother murders a handsome constable.

Pretty Monsters – It seems like in a collection like this, there will always be a story you don’t like. Like the rest of the stories in the book, Pretty Monsters is built on an interesting idea. Maybe this one just wasn’t my cup of tea. Anyhow…

The real strength of this book and Link’s writing seems to be about the relationships between the characters. As in real life, not all of these relationships are peaceful or even happy (although some are.) Link portrays all of them with an unflinching eye and the result is stories with emotional depth, warmth, pain, and even real terror. Add to this an amazing imagination, monsters, ghosts, dead girls, and magical hats, and you’ve got a real winner.

Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5 (if you call vague teenaged confusion about romance “erotic”)
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 4 out of 5

Final result: I thought Pretty Monsters was an awesome book. I’m definitely going to look for Link in the future, and am going back to her last two books to see what I missed.

Have you read this book? Did you immediately think of Edward Gorey when you read The Specialist’s Hat? Am I totally dysfunctional? I’m still bewitched, bothered, and love-sick over the Beldam, Coraline’s Other Mother.

Pretty Monsters – Kelly Link – Illustrations by Shaun Tan – Viking Juvenile – 2008

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link on Amazon

Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. Hopefully next time I review a nice juicy horror novel with loads of Weird Erotic Tension. I’m working on it! See you next time!

Published on April 21, 2009 in Book Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Happy Year of the Ox! Gung Hay Fat Choy!

In our preparations for the Chinese New Year, we arranged to have a Feng Shui consultant visit the basement. On the plus side, her consultation turned out to be free. On the minus side, she left in a hurry almost the minute she arrived. Before she left, she cried out that it was the most horrible place she’d ever seen. So we must be doing something right. We’re looking forward to lots of good luck in the New Year.

As a bonus, here’s a link to Some Chinese Ghosts by Lafcadio Hearn, published in 1887, on the Gutenburg Project website.

Another page which has a collection of Chinese Folk tales.

Lastly, a strange collection of photos of China from Life magazine.

Published on January 26, 2009 in News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .