Fantastic Metropolis

The first two books on my list I’ll discuss together, since they share the virtues that make me love them. Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville, and Homunculus, by James P. Blaylock, are the best fantasy stories I’ve read in recent memory. They are both aggressively imaginative, throwing together seemingly disparate fantasy and science fiction tropes and reconfiguring them in such a way that they are revitalized and exciting again. Reading these novels is like re-reading a pair of beloved books from your childhood, only to discover—with astonishment and joy—that the books have grown and matured along with you, speaking to you in the language of adults while retaining their sense of play. Perdido Street Station is a big, brawling fantasy, raw in places, and perhaps over-fond of the descriptive opportunities afforded by slimes and secretions; but I sat up hours into the night reading this book. I neglected health and hygiene, I missed work, I ignored the hungry cries of my two-year-old daughter and the angry remonstrations of my wife. I had to consume this book all at once! In the same fashion, Homunculus is a giddy joy to read, a wonderful stew of Victorian secret societies, treacherous hunchbacks, reanimated corpses, and mysterious dirigibles haunting the skies over London. Blaylock’s great virtue as a writer is that he has apparently never forgotten how much fun he had when he first read fantasy, and seeks to recreate it in his own work. This book is steeped in good humor, and the fun he must have had in writing it is evident on every page.

Brighten the Corner Where You Are, by Fred Chappell, was recommended to me nearly ten years ago, but I just couldn’t get past that title. It sounds like the worst sort of self-help book, with a good dose of Praise Jesus thrown in to really muck things up. I was wrong. It’s a beautiful little story steeped in Appalachian folklore, about a day in the life of a teacher in rural North Carolina whose adventures include teaching the value of uncertainty to a crop of children grown from the fertile soil of Baptist fundamentalism; engaging in a philosophical debate with a goat capering on the roof of the school; and stealing the moon from the sky. But the prose is what got me, and maybe it’ll get you too; these are the opening paragraphs of the book:

We walked along the crackling road. Those winter mornings are so cold that I felt I would ring like an anvil if my father touched me. A shining frost lay over everything, even the stones, so tough it seemed a knife could not pierce it, and the strands of barbwire were frosted so that the fence that bordered the road looked like guitar strings.

There was no moon and the constellations were caught in the top of the great walnut tree below the road like sparkling wisps of hay. As we passed beneath the trees, I watched these stars tangled in the bare black limbs; they were as unsteady and restless as fireflies.

As I page through the book for this little review, I come across a dozen other passages I want to quote, but since there’s insufficient room I’ll have to settle for reading them aloud to myself. It’s an easy consolation. Please, read this lovely book.

Unfortunately for me, I love a good horror story. This means I read all kinds of real garbage every year trying to find something written above the level of adolescent manifestos of sexual frustration. Volume after reeking volume of rape fantasies and gore-splashed idiot-protagonists (not to mention the kind of prose which leads me to believe that the first drafts were written in crayon) leave me more certain than ever that horror should not—despite the best efforts of marketers and the dearest hopes of bad writers everywhere—really be a genre unto itself. In light of this, I cannot adequately convey to you my excitement when I first read Jack Ketchum; specifically, The Girl Next Door. Make no mistake, there is violence in these pages, but it is controlled (by the writer, at least), and it is toward a purpose. Ketchum rarely resorts to the supernatural in his fiction, preferring to focus his attentions on the much more frightening horrors that bubble up out of our own crooked hearts; this book, which is quite possibly the most harrowing novel I have ever read, is no exception. The protagonist’s awareness of his own complicity in what transpires in this novel is what gives this novel its weight and drive (I give nothing away here; this is set up in the opening chapter). The prose is assured, quick, and muscular, like a brash young boxer, and some of the blows it delivers you will not see coming. I believe that Ketchum has been unfairly relegated to the horror genre, such as it is, and that his readership is much smaller than it should be as a result. He is scarier than King, less absurd than Barker, and nastier than anybody else on the block. He’s the real deal, and he deserves to be read.

One of the most neglected forms of literature, at least in the United States, is the personal essay. I love them at least as much as I love fiction. Collections aren’t very plentiful, as they don’t sell well, but they are worth seeking out. As proof I offer an essay by Brian Doyle, called “The Meteorites,” originally published in The American Scholar but available to us still in The Best American Essays 1999. Listen to this: “She worried that he was autistic, which he was not, just quiet to the point of monastic silence, except when it came to jelly orgies, during which he howled as madly as his fellows as the jelly was cornered, slain, and gobbled raw. None of the Meteorites ate anything but jelly, sopping, dripping, quivering plates of it, attacked swiftly with white plastic spoons clicking metronomically against their teeth, the vast cacaphonous lunchroom filled to bursting with small sweating children shrieking and gulping down jelly as fast as they could get the shrieks out and the jelly in.” If you like this sort of thing, I would also direct you to The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, which is a retrospective of the form, from Seneca to Edward Hoagland.

Hellboy: The Chained Coffin and Others, is a graphic novel (actually, a collection of short stories) written and illustrated by Mike Mignola. I know there’s a movie coming soon, but don’t wait for it; read this book. It’s an excellent introduction to the character if you’re not already familiar with him, and to my mind it’s the best of the five volumes so far. The artwork is nothing short of gorgeous; the writing keeps a careful balance between the funny and the genuinely creepy. “The Wolves of Saint August,” contained herein, is still the spookiest story I’ve read in comics.

Some short stories that stood out to me are “The Ceiling,” by Kevin Brockmeier, published in McSweeney’s #7; “Tachycardia,” by Paul Park, published in the January 2002 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; “State Secrets of Aphasia,” by Stepan Chapman, published in Leviathan 3; and “Along the Frontage Road,” originally published in The New Yorker, and reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2002.

Finally, I have to call your attention to The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles, by Melissa Holbrook Pierson. For me, riding a motorcycle is like smoking a cigar or watching breakers roll in from the sea: contemplative, relaxing, occasionally spiritual. This book encapsulates all the feelings that come with riding in prose that is so beautiful it almost casts light. Pierson writes about the many joys of riding, the inevitable bouts of terror (especially at night, when you are safe in bed), as well as the hurdles she had to overcome as a woman rider. If you’ve never ridden before and believe that a book on motorcycles is the last thing you need to spend your time reading, this one is for you. If you ride, oh, is this ever for you. But what more do you need from me? Her writing is its own best advocate; here, she writes of riding in the rain:

The small glow emanating from the lighted dials is a portable beacon that remains both ahead and calmly with you. The sight of the instrument panel’s little light in the greater dark puts me in mind of a tiny spaceship floating on its way through a benighted universe of unfathomed spread. The headlight glances off the slick leaves at the edge of the road, and what is beyond that quick beam waits there for you to arrive upon it and briefly launch it into existence before consigning it back to what is behind in the black.

With the dampened sound, thoughts become louder. The only thing beside yourself that you can hear, somewhere beneath you, is a steady throb of engine. It is all there is to keep you anchored to the world. All the rest, all the earth, is rain.