Cameron's Book Round-Up: 2024, part 3

The semester is winding up, so I don’t have much to say. Keeping my eyes focused on Gaza and US campuses for the moment. Not a lot of room for anything else, but fiction helps. Fiction helps.

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A Night in the Lonesome October, by Roger Zelazny.

(Link goes to Bookfinder. It is, weirdly, absent from Bookshop.org.)

The one new book I read this time around, though I’ve long been a Zelazny fan. A Night In the Lonesome October, like many Zelazny books, appears to have been written as a part of a bet: could Zelazny write a book that got his audience to root for Jack the Ripper?

I’m going to guess that Zelazny just chuckled and showed that he already had one half-written.

So, here’s the premise: every so often a full moon falls on Halloween. On such occasions, various sorcerers, warlocks, witches, monsters and other such things all gather in some out-of-the-way location, determined by means of omen, and have a contest of sorts. One side are the “Openers”, who wish to use the opportunity to open a gate to let the Old Ones through into our world. The other side are the “Closers” who want none of that, thank you very much. By convention and tradition, neither side openly identifies themselves, leading to a sort of tense collegiality among those participating in the contest.

Our story follows Snuff, a very intelligent and very long-lived black dog who serves as a familiar for Jack the Ripper, an old and experienced Closer. Jack is gathering ingredients and preparing for the contest, Snuff is out observing the neighbors and scouting for a location in the rural part of England that everything is taking place in. Along the way, he has to negotiate with other familiars and participants in the game, and keep his head down so as not to be noticed by the authorities.

It’s a nice little book, doing much the same things that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and such books do, welding together all of the stock characters that make up the Hammer horror stable and various other bits of Victoriana into a coherent whole. Alongside Jack the Ripper, you’ve got Count Dracula, the Wolfman, a monk that is legally distinct from Rasputin, Doctor Frankenstein, and a detective who cannot be anyone but Sherlock Holmes.

It’s a quick read and, frankly, deeper than one might expect. Zelazny was a master of science fiction, but was broad-ranging outside of that: he cut his teeth on hardboiled fiction and studied poetrty and Jacobean theater in graduate school before turning his hand toward the pulps. He’s always elevated any medium that he’s worked in.

The Book of Three and The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander.

I’m going to re-read the other three books, so I’ll be holding off on this one. You can easily satisfy yourself with Edgar’s reviews.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

When I went through my Master’s Program, my thesis was on Ergodic Fiction. Espen Aarseth, the Norwegian Academic who coined the term explains that this is a fusion of the Greek words ergon, “work”, and hodos “path”. It is literature that requires active and purposeful input from the reader to progress through: you need to make choices to reach the end. What seems most notable about this to me is that this inherently means that you cannot actually experience 100% of a work of fiction on a course through any given ergodic work: the elements can be recombined into any number of alternate and equally valid orders that all have their own emotional and experiential timbre that cannot be considered more “true” than any other form.

To this day, I am convinced that House of Leaves is the only successful example of this kind of fiction that I have personally read — this, sadly, includes Danielewski’s other books (which is not to call them bad, The 50 Year Sword is an excellent book, but it’s not this kind of book; and Only Revolutions wasn’t my cup of tea.)

House of Leaves is the story of Will Navidson and Karen Green, who move into a small house in Virginia and discover that it is larger on the inside and that it occasionally shifts around, sometimes in a seemingly purposeful manner. They attempt to explore it and this proves to be a trial by fire for their relationship, which —

Wait, no, that’s the Navidson Record, a different document. House of Leaves is a critical appraisal of this film, written in a style that parodies the worst excesses of academic fiction — in some places featuring struck-out text relating to the Minotaur, and a dizzying number of citations, some of which actually turn out to be real, and a small number of those which turn out to be relevant, and —

Sorry, again, because you see there’s a completely different narrative unfolding in the footnotes, following someone going by the name of Johnny Truant, who found a manuscript about a non-existent movie that a blind old man named Zampanò had narrated to a rotating cast of attractive and lustful amanuenses who Truant is now going around Los Angeles to meet and speak to while assembling Zampanò’s disparate notes into something coherent after the old man’s mysterious death. We can’t really trust what he says, though, because he makes a point of explaining that he’s lying and rewriting parts of it.

Except, it’s possibly also the work of Truant’s mother, Pelafina Heather Lièvre, who died on May 4, 1989 in a mental asylum, writing letter after letter to her absent son and sinking deeper and deeper into paranoid delusion.

The book itself is a puzzle to which there is no real answer. The dedication makes it clear that whatever you make of this story, it is not the truth: “this is not for you.” Whoever you are, this book isn’t speaking to you. At best you’re an eavesdropper, at worst you’re an intruder. For a number of reasons this makes it among the more fascinating books I’ve ever read.

A big part of that is that this book came out in May of 2000: it was the new millennium. We didn’t know what was coming, and House of Leaves was a vertiginous plunge into strange new territory. Over the next sixteen months, it was something that was being digested and understood. That process stalled out on September 11, and the culture was yanked in a very different direction.

While it’s hardly the greatest tragedy of that day, I can’t help but think that it stands as a monument to the 21st century that could have been: something that iterated on the 1990s the way that the 90s iterated on the 80s and the 80s iterated on the 70s. This is an artifact of a 21st century that we never had a chance to experience, the thesis statement for an argument we never got to hear.

Moby Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville.

This is not the version I recommend reading — it’s abridged, edited for young readers, and in French — but this is my favorite cover. Brings to mind what was said about this book in Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda.

Part of the reason that this book round-up is so short is that I read House of Leaves. The other is that I read Moby Dick. If former made a world we never got to properly experience, the latter made a world that we live in every day. A big part of this lies in Melville’s process.

Consider, in an introduction to a Thomas Ligotti collection (I think it’s the compound volume Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe) Jeff VanderMeer comments that Ligotti, essentially, ate Lovecraft entirely, and made something new in the process: something that many writers beforehand had attempted and failed at, being subsumed by the strange man from Providence.

Melville set his table and sat down to a feast of Shakespeare.

Now, I would argue that Lovecraft was only ever Lovecraft, but Shakespeare was many Shakespeares — not, in the sense that many people wrote under that name, or that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his play, but while the same hand penned MacBeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (an incomplete list of just the plays starting with “M”), we can argue that each was a different iteration of Shakespeare. There was a unity to it, but the phases of the man’s work each brought about a magnificent change that altered who he was. Melville might not have consumed the Bard in his entirety, but managed two or three courses of the man before he produced Moby Dick.

It’s a simple story: there is a man, Ahab, and there is a god, the Whale. The man is on a mission to kill the god. Even in his hubris, there is a nobility to him, as he takes in a black cabin boy who went mad from the strain and lets him stay in the captain’s cabin as he paces the deck. It was prophesied to the man that impossible things would happen to him if he did this, and each one of them comes true and he dies.

It’s a simple story: there is a mate, Starbuck, a severe but honorable man caught between his pledge to follow his captain and his duty to see the crew safely home. Alone among the sailors he attempts to stop the captain’s madness from destroying the ship and dragging all hands down to the depths.

It’s a simple story: there is a sailor, Ishmael, who goes to sea when he is in the grips of melancholy and develops an attachment — some would say platonic but I viewed it as romantic — to the harpooneer Queequeg, acting as this sailor’s squire and interpreter. A sensitive soul, he studies the life of the whalemen and records their first grasping toward a science of their prey, until on the last day of the voyage he is the sole survivor of the devastation.

Each story is simple, easy, fairly basic, but Melville assembled them together the way that a skilled craftsman assembles toothed wheels and springs and rods into a timepiece that can tick over for a hundred years. They all interlock and interlace and produce a whole that measures a world the way that the watch measures seconds. I read it unabridged, even the parts that are supposedly scientifically dubious — but I would challenge that. Ishmael calls a whale a fish, but when you get down to it there’s no such thing as a fish: so the whale breathes air and its ancestors walked on land — Charles Darwin hadn’t published his theory or evolution yet. This is a snapshot of a modern world before the theory of evolution.

So let me tell you how I see the story: there is an author named Herman Melville. Sometimes he is Ahab, sometimes he is Ishmael, sometimes he is both. He wanted to chase down and capture an idea, a novel, that he called Moby Dick or, The Whale. In the course of doing it he documented the exploitation that the workers suffered, and in catching it he was, himself, exploited. Much like the captain he described, he was dragged down by it, and (unlike the captain) he struggled to be received as an author in his own time.

The Crooked God-Machine by Autumn Christian.

(This one also isn’t on bookshop, so have an Abe Books link.)

And a sour note to end on. This was a re-read for me, and I found it compelling the first time I experienced it, though the second time was much less entertaining. I’m not going to harp on the misprints in the book, or discuss the quality of the physical object — those things are not immaterial, but they are outside the bounds of what I want to talk about.

So here’s the story, it begins in the town of Edgewater, on the Black Planet, beneath the Black Moon. Everything is fine in Charles’s family until his father loses his job, briefly takes up taxidermy with great relish, and leaves. His brother dies of a genetic disease that makes the infant boy try to eat his own fingers and toes, the matriarch of the family puts the tiny body in a bag out to be collected by Jolene, the monster that lives in the swamp behind their house. Charles vows to go and hunt her down, but is captured and made to look into a pool filled to the brim with the bones of children. This takes the shine off of everything.

Violence, sleaze, and apathy are the order of the day. Periodically, the government, led by God, will unleash plagues on different districts. There’s a stop where people are made to wait by armed guards for shuttles that take them to Hell, a prison in the bowels of the Earth. A man on TV, named Teddy, is selling “slip implants” — something that looks like a spider made of hot wire — that sits in your brain and pilots your body for seven or so years while your conscious mind sleeps, never mind that the implant can only do menial jobs and will periodically break into your loved ones rooms and speak to your loved ones in your voice, advertising the implants.

Let me also acknowledge that Christian is quite good at constructing a line that sucker-punches you. She’ll begin a statement in one place and end it in a spot that you would not have expected (what comes to mind, for me, is the sequence where the narrator is yelled at for talking during a movie shown in class — the movie is a documentary about a serial killer, and the class is Algebra.)

However, this sort of technique is better suited for short fiction: she ends up glossing over a lot of things that are necessary for a novel to work: her characters are paper-thin and, as a result of having read it before, this was much more apparent to me: the linguistic sleight-of-hand didn’t carry things this time.

There are things in here that I think are worthwhile, but I think that Christian wasn’t quite equal to the story that she wanted to tell. A lot of the setting comes across as something that a New Atheist would say sarcastically, but it kind of turns into a mess. I think it was hobbled by the author’s perception that the story that she was telling had to have a grand scope, but could be completed in what felt like a novella scope (it was over 400 pages, but the margins, the line spacing, and the leading were generous.)

I think this book is going to be found, some day, by the weirdest 17 year-old you’ve ever met and be their favorite book, and that person is going to go on to produce something better, but it didn’t land quite right for me.

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