Category: [Books, magazines, etc]

The Blind Owl

Book #12 for 2023, The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, which I read in the above recent Penguin edition (which uses different spellings of both name and title). In a certain way, this is not a million miles removed from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, at least if that book had been a lot more drug-addled. Beyond that, I’m a bit stumped. Hedayat is considered the pioneer of literary modernism in Iranian literature, which is a field I know nothing about so I’ll defer to those who do… Hedayat’s technique comes across clearly in translation (along with some choice phrases and images that are presumably why Hedayat’s work is STILL banned in Iran 70+ years after his death), rather more so than his intention; the book’s propensity for repetition of phrases and events (insofar as there are any) becomes obvious fairly quickly, lots of echoes and resonances and all that between the two parts of the book, but the reason for these things… I don’t know. One of the longest-feeling 100-page books I’ve read, I can see I’ll need to have a second go at this in future if I’m to get anything from it.

The Serpent’s Shadow

Book #11 for the year, Daniel Braum’s The Serpent’s Shadow. He and I have a mutual friend (hi Duane) on Facebook who also knows on FB pretty much everyone in the SF/fantasy/horror field, and who oftens posts when one of these people has a book going cheap on Amazon. Thus it was he drew attention to Braum’s book when the ebook was 99 cents on US Amazon about a week ago; I checked local Amazon, found the local price was similar ($1.54 in real money), and decided to invest.

Our hero is a young man, David, spending Xmas holidays in Cancun in the mid-80s. (The book is somewhat more recent than the Kane book from the other day, having first been published in 2019.) In the course of said holiday, he meets a young woman called Anne Marie and the two soon discover some of the old ways are still alive in the Yucatan jungles, and they have their own parts to play in the events. Fairly short book, properly a novella I suppose, wherein perhaps lies its main problem, i.e. the speed at which things have to happen, it probably could’ve done with a bit more breathing space. I did, however, find the critique of the effects of colonialism on the area interesting, with the white outsider David being more bothered by the damage that the spread of tourism has done to the natural beauty of the area while the Mayan locals acknowledge that it potentially gives them something more than the old chicle plantations did. It’s not great but it only cost me a buck fifty (rather better than the nearly $24 for the print edition), and I liked it enough that I want to read Braum’s other stuff now.

Darkness Weaves

FINALLY, book #10 for 2023, Darkness Weaves by Karl Edward Wagner… which was originally published in 1970 as Darkness Weaves With Many Shades in somewhat bastardised form before being republished with the shorter title in Wagner’s preferred version. I presume, therefore, that the Gateway Essentials I just finished is actually the latter one… Whatever, though, this was quite a lot of fun. Our “hero”, Kane, is to all intents and purposes the biblical Cain, a feared and fearsome warrior cursed with immortality yet not completely indestructible, living in a Conan-esque prehistory (though there are apparently later Wagner stories featuring him in the modern world) with a vaguely Lovecraftian tinge to things as well. I haven’t read a lot of sword & sorcery or heroic fantasy or whatever it’s called, so this is not uncharted but still rare territory for me… one thing I did not care for was the dialogue, which tended towards the anachronistic; I dislike overdoing archaism in fantasy settings as well (looking at YOU here, E.R. Eddison), but the reverse seemed just out of place. Good story, though, and some very crunchy battle scenes. Will read more Kane.

The single greatest comic panel ever

As I think I’ve said before, I grew up on British comics rather than American ones. Beano, Dandy, Eagle (i.e. the 80s revival, the original was a bit before my time), Battle, Whoopee, Buster, and above all 2000AD, whence this glorious image. I don’t really give a good goddamn about Marvel vs DC, and the relative merits of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams or whoever else; I was all about the likes of Massimo Belardinelli, Carlos Ezquerra, Kevin O’Neill, Steve Dillon, Mike McMahon, Cam Kennedy, Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Arthur Ranson, Ron Smith, and Ian Gibson, the artist behind this beauty. It comes from a very early Judge Dredd story, I didn’t read it until it was reprinted years later, but I’ve loved it ever since I first saw it; not exactly the greatest Dredd story ever but what a way to kick it off…

So that’s the full first page of the story to put it in context. Mum’s putting Billy to bed, putting the fear of Dredd into the poor child, when Dredd himself bursts into the apartment to give him something to be afraid of. What a stunning first page, ending in Dredd casually saying him and Giant are trying to, frankly, decapitate a poor defenceless child at the bottom of the right of the page… so you have to turn the page to discover the poor defenceless child is nothing of the sort. Marvellous. I’ve seen avowed comedies that were less funny than this one comic strip panel.

Throat-Warbler Mangrove mac Roth

One of the riddles of the ages has finally been solved! …well, maybe. When I were a lad I grew up on comics like 2000AD, none of this Marvel or DC nonsense, so one of the strips I grew up with was Pat Mills’ Slaine. The latter was my first, somewhat roundabout acquaintance with Celtic myth, a sort of Conanesque heroic fantasy with occasional SF elements…

…getting off to a marvellous start with our eponymous hero facing off with some sort of dinosaur-like monstrosity. Couldn’t not get drawn in by that sort of thing when I was 8. But how to pronounce the name of said hero? Cos we’re dealing with something old Irish here so I remember some befuddlement in the letters page about the “correct” pronunciation of an admittedly fictional name (I particularly recall one who explained at some length that it was actually “Dennis”)… which would probably have been something like Slawn-ye or Shlawn-ye. Wikipedia accepts the former but how did Pat Mills intend it to be said?

Well, somewhat randomly, I got recommended Pat Mills’ Youtube channel, where he handily has a video about a book he’s written on the subject of Slaine. And he pronounces “Slaine” as… well… “slain”, as if it were an English rather than Irish name. So there it finally is, straight from the author’s mouth… weirdly anticlimactic after 40 years somehow and a wee bit racist towards my Irish ancestors (like *I* know bugger all about Irish?), but there you go.

Hexensieber

One of the great things I’ve found about Tumblr over the years is that there’s an awful lot of vintage SF/horror/fantasy book and magazine art on there, and not just the usual American stuff. I’ve got a ton of fumetti covers from there, plus whatever the Spanish French and German equivalents of fumetti are, which brings me to this:

I’ve seen this image on Tumblr a few times, but only recently have I seen it with such strident colours. It’s not quite as bold in this printed edition:

As seen here:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?603894

The picture itself is by Rudolf Sieber-Lonati, an Austrian artist who did tons of covers for magazines and pulp novels like this; you can sample his range at this site devoted to him (in German), which apparently also carries a few items misattributed to him according to his ISFDB entry…

As also seen here:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?781729

…but it also appears on this recent reprint of an even older Krimi from Bastei, and with the markedly stronger colours of the version at the top. I’m curious as to which is the “right” version now, is the more colourful version what Sieber-Lonati actually painted (and the colours got lost in the printing and/or that copy of the magazine has faded) or was it enhanced somehow for the reprinted issue (but why, if it was)? I don’t know. I like the bigger colours better, anyway…

Dracula

Book #9 for 2023. So I’ve finally read Dracula (yes, I know, I’m a bad goth). I do find it a bit odd that I’ve seen a number of screen versions of the story—the Universal and Hammer series, the Coppola version, the BBC version from 1977 (I have the older Mystery & Imagination version too but haven’t watched it yet), even Jess Franco’s version, plus of course Nosferatu ’22 and ’79*—but had never actually read the book. Or, to be more precise, had never finished it.

I think I got it in the early 90s (fairly sure I still have that paperback) and for reasons I no longer remember I never actually read the whole thing through. I have memories of getting as far as the destruction of vampire Lucy but no idea why I stopped there. Was I bored? Was I finding the book simply not very good? Cos let’s face it, it’s not exactly a literary masterpiece. I suspect its status as an iconic classic of the genre is less due to its own inherent merits than it is to its various screen adaptations, particularly the 1931 version with that Lugosi fellow, which I don’t think is a particularly good film… it starts great but goes kind of rapidly downhill, in which it’s not actually unlike the book. First four chapters with Jonathan Harker in Dracula’s castle—fine. After that it’s a slog through various characters’ journals and other notes, of which they all seem to have plenty of time to write no matter how serious the situation.

Dracula is a fairly long book (just under 500 pages in the edition I read), certainly the longest I’ve read in ages, and not a lot really happens in it; the pacing is kind of ponderous (the action taking place over several months; I think the multi-narrator structure doesn’t help much), the characters are barely cardboard, the dialogue full of late Victorian melodramatics, and the count himself is, frankly, absent from most of it. He’s lurking somewhere in the background at all times, but he takes very little direct part in things. Something about it feels kind of small despite Dracula being a threat potentially to the whole world. And, frankly, the character of Renfield makes more sense in the Browning/Freund film where he replaces Jonathan Harker’s character.

It’s good, I just don’t think it’s great; I think I respect its historical importance to the genre more than anything. I wish I could find the 1901 abridgement Stoker himself made for a paperback edition which some think was an improvement. At any rate, after 30-odd years I finally finished it (longer than it took me with Ulysses), and am now in a position to also finally read the Swedish/Icelandic and Turkish knock-offs/rewrites. It would’ve been too foolish even for me to have read those before reading the original, after all…

* No, I haven’t seen the Dario Argento version except for clips. I suspect that requires a degree of masochism I rarely possess…