Review: Next Town Over

Still hammering away at a short story I need to finish and turn in by, oh gee, tomorrow. In the meantime, however, let's talk about Next Town Over (http://www.nexttownover.net/), by Erin Mehlos.

The story thus far pits Vane Black, apparent bounty hunter and vengeful revenant—raised from the dead by magic, but kept upright by her own brand of steampunk blacksmithry—against outlaw/magician John Henry Hunter, a charming bastard with a positive fetish for shiny jewelry and good horseflesh. Since Hunter's pyromantic/necromantic skillz seem to be what gave literal rise to Vane's condition, one can assume they have a complicated history (he also calls her “darlin'”, which rings as somewhat of a giveaway, from my POV). One way or the other, she'll do anything to keep on his trail, including crippling a local smith in order to use his forge or horsejacking a pair of otherwise perfectly nice muleskinners dumb enough to cut her down after she's been hung—the woman's far more Jonah Hex than Belle Starr, even historically-accurate Belle Starr, is what I'm saying.

With my crappy visual sense, I often tend to gloss over or even not particularly notice the art part of webcomics, but Mehlos's work is striking: Her slightly cartoonish, similarly-featured characters inhabit a landscape that changes depending on the narrative focus. Vane-centric sections, for example, are often minimalist and dialogue-poor as a classic Clint Eastwood film, all empty, epic grass plain and arroyo crags, blurred by pace and motion. Ones involving Hunter, OTOH, have far more pizzaz and snap—much like the shiny red-and-gold fire-magic he splashes out on almost every gesture, big or tiny. Vane comes from the empty places, while Hunter is attracted to small pockets of civilization, where the finer things in life may be found and gained, whether at the point of gun or spell. But both of them are figures of chaos, completely unconcerned with the way their mutual vendetta scars both the land around them and those who inhabit it.

So, yeah: A pair of antiheroes with grey motivations and a flair for the dramatic, plus horses, magic, and punkery of all sorts—no, I wouldn't be interested in that at all, would I? Now, if Mehlos could just update a bit faster...

This Should Be At Livejournal

...but LJ's down, and may be down some time. I suppose there's always the option of switching the Dreamwidth, but...yeah, I dunno. Still not really feeling that place, considering its cast of proselytizing backbone inhabitants. So, instead: Have the entry I would've put up there, if that option was open to me.

At the moment, I'm still behind as hell on A Tree of Bones, still unimpressed by my own work ethic, still wrestling intermittently with a new outline bent on pruning both the one I began with (two years ago) and the one I came up with last year (when I thought A Rope of Thorns would be the end of the haul) down to their best bits and then knitting it all together. At the moment, it looks lumpy to say the least, and I'm frankly scared. Can only hope that my "Deadlines are our friend!" genes will eventually kick in, before things really go to shit.

In the meantime, I've been trying to catch up on various books, including some stuff I got out of the library. Dean Koontz's What the Night Knows was a welcome return to form, crammed with crazy gothic freakery--a serial killer/ghost/possession/body ride thriller full of fairly smart characters who nevertheless make dumb decisions because A) they're young and inexperienced or B) don't know they're in a horror narrative. I was very amused by the scene in which our hero spills his woes to a local priest, only to have the priest recommend a psychiatrist. OTOH, the clear implication that liking Harry Potter/Narnia-type stories opens you up to Satanically-influenced manipulation rings a bit dicey, but YMMV.

Odder and potentially more useful is a collection from Skyhorse called Vintage Vampire Stories, which has the dubious distinction of being the worst copy-edited book I've read in years (one tale has five separate errors in the same paragraph), yet fills a need I never really knew I had: Images of the vampire from well before the "rules" of mainstream vampirism were completely established. Granted, it contains Bram Stoker's original 1890 notes for the novel he was then going to call Count Wampyr (good save, my man), but the rest of the tales--which range in date from 1679 to 1909--are incredibly free-ranging: We've got medical "vampirism" (actually more a combination of berserker rage and cannibalistic hunger), a haunted mirror that sucks the life out of those who live adjacent to it, something which seems like the myth of Tithonus combined with psychic youth-vampirism, little-known localized variants like the Portugese bruxsa, the Chinese "blood-drinking corpse" and the Moldavian "Children of Judas", an African "blood fetish" that's a mummified hand which strangles people in their sleep, and the astral projection of a dead psychic which is finally "laid" by an equally astral-projected Tibetan lama.

At least five of the stories also very specifically recall the archaic connection between vampire and "vamp", or femme fatale: Stuff like Dick Donovan's "The Woman with the Oily Eyes", in which our titular creature might be anything from a con artist/poisoner to a witch or genetic vampire, born with a full set of teeth and her hypnotically mesmerizing eyes sealed together, or Phil Robinson's "Medusa", who keeps her face constantly covered for fear of attracting men whose life-force she'll suck out without even really wanting to. Or Hugh McCrae's "The Vampire", which is basically just a two-page sketch about some sap getting taken for everything he's worth by a turn-of-the-century golddigga with "stuffed busks and stuffed hair". (His brief biography notes that he lived a Bohemian life and belonged to an artists' club called "The Prehistoric Order of Cannibals"; somebody should write a story about that.)

I can't say any of these stories are good per se, but many are quite fascinating...and at least one, Mary Fortune's "The White Maniac: A Doctor's Tale", is unintentionally hilarious. Our hero, a dashing Victorian physician, is brought in to consult on the case of a French "princess" who's been confined by her uncle in an all-white house--he says she has to be kept segregated from all colour (especially red, get it?) in order to stave off murderous attacks of monomania. But she claims it's her uncle who's crazy, and naturally--because she's cute ad uncle isn't--Dr Moron takes her word for it; he decides to marry her, and shows up at the house with a bouquet of red roses.

...as I spoke I uncovered my scarlet bouquet and shook out its blossoms. The sight of it made a terrible impression upon my companion; his knees trembled as if he were about to fall, and his face grew whiter than his garments.

"In the name of heaven, what are you going to do?" he gasped.

"I am simply going to present my bride with a bouquet," I said, and as I said so I laughed, an empty, hollow laugh. I cannot describe my strange state of mind at that moment; I felt as if myself under the influence of some terrible mania.

"By all you hold sacred, Charles Elveston, I charge you to desist! Who or what are you, that you should set your youth and ignorance of this woman against my age and bitter experience?"

"Ha ha!" was my only response, as I made towards the door.

As one might assume, this doesn't turn out well. In Simpsons voices:

"I told you she was crazy and would try to bite your throat out!"

"I said 'ha ha'!"

Okay, I see it's begun to rain outside, which explains my headache. More Tylenol Sinus, and back to the grind...

New Reviews: A Rope of Thorns/A Book of Tongues

I'm consistently amazed by how long the recognition tail on A Book of Tongues has been, thus far, and--given the initial distribution/release problems with A Rope of Thorns--can only hope this state of affairs will continue with the other two (especially once I'm actually done with A Tree of Bones).

But I've been really negligent in terms of linking to new reviews of either, so here we go:

A Book of Tongues

KV Taylor at Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/182827318)

Cory Redekop's Shelf-Monkey (http://shelf-monkey.blogspot.com/2011/05/monkey-droppings-book-of-tongues-by.html)

Andrea Blythe (http://www.andreablythe.com/2011/02/a-book-of-tongues/)

Inside the Reader's Studio (http://readerstudio.blogspot.com/2011/04/review-book-of-tongues.html)

CSI:Librarian (http://csilibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/review-a-book-of-tongues-by-gemma-files/)

A Rope of Thorns

Sonar4 Landing Dock Reviews (http://sonar4landingdockreviews.blogspot.com/2011/05/rope-of-thorns-by-gemma-files-review.html?zx=5c940b8c3e126113)

Library Journal [be prepared to scroll down] (http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviewsbook/890748-421/sf__fantasy_reviews_june.html.csp)

Jene Moore's The (Hopeful) Librarian (http://jenemoore.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/hot-off-the-press-rope-thorns/)

Cory Redekop's Shelf-Monkey (http://shelf-monkey.blogspot.com/2011/07/monkey-droppings-canadian-authors-and.html)

Thanks to everybody...it's amazing.;)

Queering SFF Review of BOOK up at Tor.com

...by Brit Mandelo, and crazily good, here:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/07/queering-sff-a-book-of-tongues-by-gemma-files

Also, my World's Biggest Bookstore interview is up on the 'Net in full, here:

http://scififanletter.blogspot.com/2010/07/gemma-files-author-interview.html

I realize I haven't been around a lot, but that's because I really need to pour on speed if I'm going to break my way through Part Two of A Rope of Thorns on schedule. Since it got mentioned in Rue Morgue, and all, feel free to keep up with my slightly more intimate/shameful personal blog over at Livejournal, here:

http://handful_ofdust.livejournal.com

On right now: Book reviews of my own, at least in passing. With extra small autistic boy sickness report!

After Great Silence...

…a huge influx of critical response, starting with:

Rue Morgue #102
by Justine Warwick

Graced with an absolutely beautiful cover by designer Erik Mohr, Gemma Files’ first novel, A Book of Tongues, is a “weird West” tale set in 1867. It tells the story of Pinkerton detective Ed Morrow, who is sent to infiltrate a brutal gang of outlaws led by the Reverend Asher Rook, ex-Confederate chaplain and dark magician, in order to learn more about Rook’s strange abilities for the government cause. Morrow becomes increasingly entangled in Rook’s world—one of sorcery, gods, visions and blood—and his only hope of escape, or of completing his task, lies with Rook’s lover, Chess Pargeter, a violent man with a bloody past and, if Rook has his way, a dreadful future.

Files’ poetic prose is pitch-perfect: languid, precise and full of dark imagery. While the plot is sedately paced, the author takes the time to build up the universe in which her characters exist: a pitiless world in which death and destruction are commonplace, loyalties are always shifting and magic flows through ever aspect like a kind of perverse electricity, with the potential to destroy everything it touches. Files’ characters are complicated and profound, motivated largely by lust, both for power and for Chess Pargeter, who becomes a catalytic figure for Morrow and his quest when the two begin an affair. The sexuality of the three central players is as violent as their lives in the desert, the pioneer towns and the slums of San Francisco, and underscores not only their marginalization but their power to destabilize the world they live in—whether through magic or by their very existence.

It’s a brooding and deeply sinister novel, which will undoubtedly be a challenging read for some, but Files has definitely managed to create a world complex enough to sustain the series that this book initiates. A Book of Tongues closes, if not quite with a cliffhanger ending, with a revelation that sets up the reader for the events of a sequel, the upcoming A Rope of Thorns; it will be intriguing to see where the twists and coils of Files’ imagination take us next.

Other reviews I totally forgot to link to (because I am a doofus):

http://www.freewebs.com/hfrzine/june2010reviews.htm
http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/?p=6605
http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2010/06/201051-book-of-tongues-gemma-files.html
http://www.ideomancer.com/?p=285
http://kmarkhoover.livejournal.com/390546.html?view=1623186#t1623186

And some just-plain-folks with-blogs reviews, too, like this crazy-flattering one from http://mercwriter.livejournal.com:

So. Much. WIN. In this book. *makes inarticulate sounds of glee* It was a "Merc book" through and through--I need the next one now, please. *fangirls some more* The Weird West, gay cowboys, ancient Mayan gods returning to the world, hexslinging magic, post-Civil War politics and tensions still going on; the novel has a complicated structure, which I liked, and the love story is so refreshingly anti-sentimental. Poor copyediting in places (especially the last third) kept jarring me, but for the story and characters, I could overlook the technical elements. *is a total Chess fangirl*

Plus this slightly less unreservedly positive one from A Wild Book Chase, here (http://wildbookchase.blogspot.com/2010/06/major-karnage-chapter-1-and-other.html).

Finally, a crazy yet incredibly flattering link: Somebody at RPG.net who calls themselves “radiant song” is reading my book and posting color commentary as they go! (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=12389764) I like (his? her?) analysis of why Chess is such a damn homme fatale, which is…pretty spot-on, actually.;) I’ll be following subsequent posts with increasing interest.

Steve and I also got interviewed for the Shirley Jackson Awards by Charles Tan, here, about our nominated novella “each thing I show you is a piece of my death” (http://shirleyjacksonawards.blogspot.com/2010/06/gemma-files-and-stephen-j-barringer.html); Charles later interviewed me about my nominated short story “The Jacaranda Smile”, here (http://shirleyjacksonawards.blogspot.com/2010/06/gemma-files-interview-with-charles-tan.html).

Oh, and finally, I’m agented: As of last week, Monica Pacheco from Anne McDermid & Associates is my literary representative, contingent on me writing a novel that’s a a bit more mainstream than my current blood-soaked black magic gay porno horse opera id-fic. Hey, I’m game—I mean, I was going to do that anyhow.;)

Okay, so: Hopefully I won't be away so long, next time. Nice to see y'all.

OMG, Fangoria!

Fangoria #294
Book of the Month: A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files
By Chris Alexander

Fango readers residing in Toronto may recall the days when noted, International Horror Guild award-winning Gemma Files used to scribble film reviews for lefty arts and culture newspaper Eye Weekly. As a film-school-slogging youth, I fell in love with her, the way she championed the less fortunate and less popular pictures and how her critical barometer was dictated by her eccentricities and personal life experience. She was also a kick-ass wrangler of words (and I told her as much in an open letter to Eye—the very first time my voice was put in print).

Since those early days, Files’ skills have clearly sharpened, her dark, deeply deranged and unapologetically sexual works careening wildly into the messier realms of the Freudian id while serving as works of unfettered imagination. Her short stories have been adapted for the short-lived The Hunger TV series and collected in two brilliant collections, Kissing Carrion and [The] Worm in Every Heart. But it is in her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series, that her outrageous but creatively honest chops get free reign to freak out.

The story’s set-up is classic, American Western, with a twist: In a blown-out, post-Civil War West, a Pinkerton[']s agent named Ed Morrow attempts to infiltrate the world of “hexslinger” wizard/outlaw Asher Rook and drag his supernatural secrets back to his employers. But the deeper he gets wormed into Rook’s universe, the more ensnared in homosexually fuelled hocus-pocus he becomes, with Rook’s lover Chess Pargeter figuring heavily into his very survival. Somehow, Aztec goddesses and the fate of the planet also make their way into Files’ completely outlandish head-spin of a story, and the easily offended or those put off by a challenging narrative need not apply.

Files has always worn her influences on her sleeve, and Tongues reads like the culmination of myriad diverse stimuli. The operatic drama of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York rubs against the cross-genre cheek of True Blood, mashed with a healthy dollop pf J.R.R. Tolkien by way of a dusty, mud- and semen-caked Deadwood; and of course, Files’ own hot ‘n’ heavy gay-erotica leanings also get a full XXX-rated workout here. That seems to be the source of her power—blending pulp fiction with profound, often poetic prose that does what all good horror fiction should do, which is mirror our collective humanity while jettisoning us into the black, blood-drenched ether.

A Book of Tongues is truly one-of-a-kind, violent, carnal and creepy, and also serves as the setup for a subsequent installment. With foreplay this good, the follow-up should be the kind of phantasmagorical climax Files’ fans have been waiting for.


N.B.: To think that A) It's been almost fifteen years since I first met Chris Alexander over badly-burnt videotapes of Lucio Fulci films at the St. Lawrence market and B) now he's the editor-in-chief of Fangoria, thus allowing him to pump C) my damn first novel, which I started writing almost as a joke, and is currently in the process of breaking me wide open...

Man. Life is weird, isn't it? And amazing.

A Book of Tongues Review, from Locus Magazine (April 2010)

At some point, most religions seem to offer visions of widespread gore and pending annihilation—perhaps none more gorily than the linked faith of the ancient Aztecs and Mayans. For her first novel A Book of Tongues, Gemma Files injects elements from that religion into the already-brutal Wild West soon after the Civil War, amping up the horror of a very dark tale that introduces the Hexslinger Series. Even Clint Eastwood’s stoic gunslinger from those spaghetti westerns might blanch at some of the doings here, as Files describes them with a graphic, unflinching eloquence.

Her “hexslinger” Asher Rook is a former preacher, turned by extreme trauma into a magician who now wields his small black Bible like a weapon. In it he can always find appropriate words for a curse, which lifts “bodily from those gilt-edged pages in one flat curl of unstrung ink, a floating necklace of black gothic type” (shown here in such a text), with devastating results.

Rook’s gang includes his gay lover Chess Pargeter, a green-eyed madman with red-gold hair, tireless sexual appetites, a phenomenal ability with guns, and a complete lack of scruples. A newcomer to the gang, undercover Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow, is on assignment to investigate the criminal use of magic but has few defenses against its use on himself—including one episode that will leave him both horrified and ashamed.

While the members of this little outfit are no strangers to homicide, robbery, and Barbary Coast whorehouses, as bloodletters they’re complete amateurs next to the elder powers who’ve been haunting Rook’s dreams and eventually draw him into a kind of hell where two opposing female entities have different ideas of his (and our world’s) destiny.

Violent, sometimes foul-mouthed, explicit in many ways, A Book of Tongues may discomfort anyone except the most seasoned fan of horror or homicidal Westerns. More than one passage made me wish I could “read” with my eyes tight shut. But a kind of natural poetry runs through even the worst of it, combined with an imaginative view of magic. it’s there in the title taken from one of its epigraphs, a poem by Gwendolyn MacEwen. That quote opens with the title phrase and ends: “Beware! I [now] know a language so beautiful and lethal / My mouth bleeds when I speak it.” Such an image transcends mere gore, and so does this debut novel.

—Faren Miller, Locus Magazine, April 2010.