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.

P.R.!

My Torontoist profile is up , and lookin' damn fine, if I say so myself. You'll find it here:

http://books.torontoist.com/2010/05/speaking-in-tongues-gemma-files-on-the-hexslinger-series/

Enjoy!

ChiZine Short Story Contest

Also: Some of you may recall that I won this particular competition a few years back, with "Spectral Evidence". But as of June 1st, I'm well-pleased to be helping judge the 15th ChiZine Short Story Contest, along with such coolio fellow judges as Dave Nickle, Brent Hayward and Paul Tremblay. Hellblazer writer Mike Carey will be the tie-breaker.

Details:

PRIZES:
1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes: Publication in ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words at seven (7) cents per word (USD). There will also be five honourable mentions.

GUIDELINES:

***PLEASE NOTE: SUBMISSIONS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED UNTIL JUNE 1st, 2010!***

• Dark.
• Well-written.
• 4,000 words or less.
• Rich Text Format or Microsoft Word attachment.
• No reprints.
• No simultaneous submissions.
• No multiple submissions.
• Send to ONLY this address: savory@rogers.com
(Submissions sent to any other address will be deleted unread.)

All submissions will be stripped of author identification and sent to the judges via a third party.
Deadline for the contest is June 30th, 2010. Winners and honourable mentions will be announced by July 31st, 2010. The top three placers will be published in ChiZine issue #46 (October–December, 2010).

(Note: ChiZine editorial staff members are ineligible for this contest.)

So, yeah: Bring it. Da dark. Da creep. I look forward.;)

Amazon

Ah, can't please everybody!;) (http://www.amazon.com/Book-Tongues-1-Hexslinger/product-reviews/0981297862/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1)

Actually, I've been waiting for my first Amazon review, and thought it would likely as not be from somebody who was more put off than enthused over my trouser-ripping sensibilities. Nevertheless, I'm happy to note he seems to have liked the other parts of it well enough. Just stop gaying up your blood-soaked black magic horse opera so much, Gemma! Geez!

Luckily for me, a couple of slightly more gay-friendly folks have added fresh and lovely reviews in on top. Anybody out there who'd care to add their own?

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.

A Book of Tongues Interstitial: Music, Music, Music

Whenever it comes to music, like Laurence-as-Prince-Naveen in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog might say, “I’m for it.” It’s undeniably important to my process—setting a mood, giving me character insight, helping me explain things to myself. For years now, the second thing I always do when I start a new project (after my initial notes) is to cobble together a play-list of songs that remind me of my characters.

What was particularly pleasant with A Book of Tongues, however, is that because it’s ostensibly a historical piece, I was able to cross-breed my bone-deep love for folk, alt-country and stuff that simply hit the right chord. Plus, my beta readers—all great cataloguers of various tracks and artists themselves—were able to recommend and share the things that came into their heads as they followed along with me at every point in the curve, widening my spectrum of influences substantially.

As the year wore on, many original tracks were dropped and replaced, but the backbone remained firm: A soundtrack emerged that revolved specifically around themes of bad love, loss of faith, betrayal, pain and revenge. Some parts of it even began to suggest plot twists and/or character developments, which is (for me) the hallmark of truly great/useful music. Here’s the result:

The Essential Book of Tongues Playlist

1. “Two Sisters,” Roger Wilson

I’ll be true to my love/If my love will be true to me…

The only song to be quoted directly in the text, this is the single most despairing version of an already amazingly sad narrative—a version of the same story told in “The Bonny Swans” by Loreena McKennit and “The Cruel Sister” by Kerstin Blodig, except without the miraculous harp or the denouncement from beyond the grave, let alone any sort of reconciliation or regret. Instead, we’re left with a coda which “proves” humanity’s guiding emotions to be jealousy and greed; only makes sense that this is the one “English” Oona chooses to sing when she gets so low down even the opium isn’t enough to help her forget.

2. “I Go Like the Raven”, Dave Carter and Tracey Grammer

Sonya Taaffe first introduced me to these sadly unsung bluegrass folk artists through “Cat-Eye Willie Claims his Lover”, then supplied me with a flood of supplemental material. I glommed onto several tracks, many of which came to remind me specifically of Chess’s sprightly nastiness—“Crocodile Man”, for example, and “41 Thunderer” (a dreamier version of “The Devil’s Right Hand” which casts a man’s gun as his femme fatale). But then there’s “When I Go,” which would do just as well as a eulogy for “Grandma”, and spat up the image of a swirling column of bone-dust and sand which eventually became the pillar of blood Ixchel peeps out at Rook through. So it all fits.

3. “Black Soul Choir”, 16 Horsepower

Oh, every man is evil, Lord, every man's a liar/
Unashamed with a wicked tongue, singin' in the black soul choir...

As I’ve said, 16 HP quickly became both the inspiration for Sheriff Mesach Love in particular and the quintessential “Fear of God” material embodying Reverend Rook’s ambivalent fascination with the way his own growing power seems to eat away at his always-hypocritical, ever-diminishing faith. Also recommended: “Brimstone Rock”, “Splinters” (Yeah, you saw it comin’/And yet you did not flee…), “Horse-Head Fiddle” (for Rook’s not-exactly-alone-time in the desert) and, naturally, their awestruck, painful, churning live version of “Sinnerman” (And the rock cried out…).

4. “The Bachelor”, Patrick Wolf

Another Chess song, embodying his utter lack of ambivalence about his own contrary nature, particularly as regards his queerness. I love the fact that Wolf really does seem to be writing it like a slightly perverse Childe Ballad (Poor little turtledove, sitting up in pine/Dreaming of your own true love, so why not me for mine?). If I had to put a time and place on it, it’d probably fit best with Chess at War, flaunting himself around and enjoying the mess his new trade gives him license to create. But the Rook comes in view, and it all goes to shit.

5. “There is a Ghost”, Marianne Faithfull

This track, from her album Before the Poison, is very much about the connection Chess and Rook make with each other and the aftershocks which linger behind its severance: Memory, pain, literal nostalgia. (Oh my lover, oh my lover/Never was there another/Where has my lover-man gone?/Away…away…) Not to mention how it twins extremely well with the far more overt violent fatalism of—

6. “Furious Angels”, Rob Dougan

Yes, yes—based on a track from The Matrix: Reloaded, all that. Like “Apologize” by OneRepublic (with or without Timbaland’s participation), this would maybe fall under the “crack” portion of the mix, if I was genuinely ashamed to have it here. But I’m not, since in a lot of ways, this became the emblematic Chess/Rook OTP song of choice; the one that says that by loving this person—or anyone, maybe—it’s like you made a mistake, a whole big heapin’ pile of ‘em, and now you can run, but you can’t hide. Because you better be extremely sure that if you do, God (or the gods—a god, anyhow) is going to find you, no matter how far you go, and fuck your shit up.

Like a sentence of death,
I got no options left,
I've got nothing to show now.
I'm down on the ground,
I've got seconds to live,
and you can't go now.
'Cause love, like an invisible bullet shot me down
and I'm bleeding, yeah I'm bleeding
and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.
They will bring you back to me.

You're a dirty needle,
you're in my blood and there's no cure in me.
I wanna run, like the blood from a wound
to a place you can't see me.
'Cause love, like a blow to the head has left me stunned
and I'm reeling, yeah I'm reeling
and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.

You're a cold piece of steel between my ribs
and there's no saving me.
And I can't get up,
from this wet crimson bed that you made for me.
That you made for me!
'Cause love like a knife in the back has cut me down
and I'm bleeding, yeah I'm bleeding,
and if you go, angels will run to defend me, to defend me.

'Cause I can't get up, I'm as cold as a stone,
I can feel the life fade from me.
I'm down on the ground, I've got second to live,
and what's that waits for me, oh that waits for me!
'Cause love like a sentence of death, left me stunned,
and I'm reeling, yeah I'm reeling,
and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.

See also: Dougan’s own “Nothing at All” and Dave Matthews Band’s “When the World Ends” (also from TM: R’s soundtrack), plus Snow Patrol’s “Run” and “Set Fire to the Third Bar” (featuring Martha Wainwright). They’re mainstream pop apocalyptastic!

7. “Las Cruces Jail”, Two Gallants

Well I...spent last night in Las Cruces Jail, rainin' hail, born to fail/
Nobody comin' for to go my bail, sun, don't you rise tomorrow.../
I see the gallows' altar, a circle 'round the sun/
They gonna hang me if I stay and shoot me if I run...

Like “Sam Hall”—I prefer the Johnny Cash version, because that is how I roll—this is a song about being fast, bad and doomed in the Old Wild West, and illustrates the point that much as I like Chess (and the Rev), it can never be forgot that between ‘em, they’ve killed a whole lot of people who may not have really deserved it. Dicey! Similarly recommended, therefore, for similar reasons: “Train to Jackson”, by Jeffrey Foucault, and “Black River Killer”, by Blitzen Trapper, with its almost John Connolly-esque implications of serial killer as wandering, flesh-trapped fallen angel (I’ve been wanderin’ in the dark about as long as sin/But they say it’s never too late to start again…[but] I killed the first man that I came upon/’Cause the Devil works quick, you know it don’t take long).

8. “Water to Sky”, Thea Gilmore

Along with “Lucinda” by Tom Waits, this is a song I associate specifically with “English” Oona Pargeter, both in her Before and After phases. Indeed, the constant steampunk whoosh-THUNK of percussion behind “Lucinda” even reminds me of the sound the Enemy’s wood-slat ribcage makes when pumping open and closed, open and closed, as well as the Manifold’s nasty chatter. The trick here is that while “Lucinda” casts Oona and her like as infectious forces of negative predestination, “Water to Sky” is about a woman who could be seen as either a weirdly innocent victim or a force of nature untameable even in death—someone worthy of being remembered, either way. Thus moving us subtly towards where Chess needs to eventually end up, vis a vis the ladiez.

9. “Alphabet of Hurricanes” by Tom McRae

Caught in a whirlwind/
Of broken sticks and bones/
An alphabet of hurricanes/
Can’t blow this drifter home…

McRae’s transplanted British voice--hoarse, light, yearning--beautifully echoes the open spaces of my fake Arizona and parts Weird West, a haphazard mixture of scrub and desert and bare, broken rock, buttes and fossils, all ceaseless, mapless movement and activity with no particular aim in mind but chaos. Also good for that: “Me & Stetson”, “Mermaid Blues”, “You Will Rise”.

10. “America”, Tracy Chapman

And here we (finally) have a song representing things as seen from the slightly less white dude-centric portion of our narrative—the “secret” history of the not-exactly-New World, equally suitable for indigenous types like Rainbow Lady Ixchel and the Dine Hataalli known as “Grandma” as it might be for Songbird herself, the first-gen immigrant witch-queen of San Francisco’s Chinatown. One way or the other: You were lost and got lucky/Came upon a shore/Found you were conquering America…

Okay: Way too long, at this point. But here’s eleven more tracks well worth your while, if you want something to read along to--

“Blackest Crow”, Angi West
“Hole in the Middle”, Emily Jane White
“Bad Man’s World”, Jenny Lewis
“Black Hearted Love”, PJ Harvey and John Parrish
“One More Cup of Coffee”, Bob Dylan
“Black Acres”, Elysian Fields
“Up Jumped the Devil”, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
“From a Shell”, Lisa Germano
“Damned to Hell”, John Butler Trio
“Sunken Waltz”, Calexico
“Ten Million Slaves”, Otis Taylor