Goosebumps

In the mid-1990s, R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series was a sensation, creeping out kids across the globe. The phenomenon of kid-friendly horror fiction is hardly a new one, so Kate and Jack tackle three Goosebumps titles and see how they stack up against the terrifying stories of their childhoods. Bring on the haunted houses, possessed dummies, and nightmarish theme parks!

This month's guest reader is Aunt John from Kindertrauma, the long-running website dedicated to all things childhood-horror-related. 

How weird are the Goosebumps books? Why do people love them so much? How do you say Goosebumps in Dutch? What highly inappropriate Freudian subtext can our hosts insert into their conversation about these stories for young readers? All these questions and more will be answered in this episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

See you in 2017, friends.

Talislanta and the Gothic

My friends and I played a bit of Talislanta in high school, but it proved to be a difficult setting to get across to my peers at the time. It was too weird, too alien, too unlike the usual mash-up of Lord of the Rings and Conan that fantasy usually fell back on. The fourth edition of Talislanta's core book advises you to pick one general area to start out with, focusing on that slice of the setting and building outward once you're comfortable with it. Either the edition I had never mentioned that or I missed it or the idea of only using one smaller area of the massive campaign world never occurred to me because in practice it was a nightmare trying to convey this unique setting as a teenager to other teenagers.

Rereading the fourth edition made me realize where I should have started when trying to run a Talislanta game. What immediately caught my a‚ttention was the description of the Western Lands: "Opposing religious factions, witch hunters, and secret cults make this a good starting place for local-scale campaigns based on intrigue and subterfuge" (430). 

Hold up. Religious factions? Witch hunters? Secrets cults? This sounds downright Gothic to me! Cue to me flipping to the larger detailing of the Western Lands. The High Orthodoxy of Aaman, with its inquisitors, monastic orders, and templars, would make a dandy stand-in for the Gothic’s vision of the Catholic Church; Necron, City of the Dead, is haunted by necrophages (read: ghouls) and ghasts (liches); the Sarista of Silvanus are literal gypsy analogs; the Dhuna of the Witchwood have enough wiggle-room in their occult orders to be either kindly druids preserving the lost ways of an Old Faith or Wicker Man-style evil pagans; the Werewood is home to banes (vampires) and werebeasts; the Zandir work as a decadent, corrupt culture; etc.

I think if I had scaled down the setting to focus on Talislanta as a Gothic Fantasy game set in its Western Lands I would have had more success getting the game going. I certainly would have had a better idea about what to do with it.

Theory of Creepiness, Pest Masks, When Meat Extract was King

A Theory of Creepiness (David Livingstone Smith for Aeon)


Creepy Yet Cool, Pest Masks! (Pixivision)

When Meat Extract Was King (Rob Baker for Flashbak)

Firearm Problems in Old-School and 5e D&D

Old-school D&D is a pretty abstract game when it comes to the mechanics of combat (see, for example, hit points, armor class, the functional similarity of dissimilar weaponry), and yet when it comes time to introduce black powder firearms suddenly people start talking about using different damage dice versus specific armor types, period-accurate reload times, and translating the peculiarities of smooth bores vs. rifling, to say nothing of detailed comparisons of matchlock and flintlock firing mechanisms.

Suddenly a game that privileges ease of play over realism is bogged down in a mire of special properties, edge cases, and bolted-on house rules that seem at odds with the base system.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a pretty good example of this effect in action. LotFP is a game content to abstract melee options. It doesn't have a big detailed chart of everything you can use to bludgeon or stab someone to death with in the game; instead, weapons are ranked great, medium, minor, or small, and you're left to fluff them accordingly. 

(There are a few weird outliers, like the cestus, polearm, and spear which have some special-case rules, but generally things are kept simple and consistent rather than realistic and detailed.)

And then you get to the firearms appendix and all that simplicity and consistency flies out the window. Now you've got bullet-pointed lists of special rules for firing mechanisms (with asterisked exceptions), gun and barrel types, and any firearm accessories with mechanical add-ons (such as apostles) that you're bringing to the party. 

My own firearm rules back when I was playing Labyrinth Lord had moments of being equally as convoluted and contrary to the free-wheeling spirit of the rules. At various points I had bespoke rules about range and reloading based on some way-too-intensive research, exploding damage dice rules, etc. It was a mess and it added nothing good to my games.

Instead of coming up with new cruft to add to the game, I should have taken inspiration from Erik Jensen and just used the rules for ranged weapons that already exist in the game. At the level of abstraction that most old-school D&D games default to, you're just better off using the stats of bows or crossbows and reskinning the fictional aesthetics of the weapon than detailing all sorts of new rules to make it "realistic." John Bell gets it. Brian Mathers gets it. 

5e D&D has somewhat of the opposite problem. Firearm rules are buried in an optional section of the Dungeon Master's Guide (267-268). Generally, the rules are pretty simple: the black powder firearms follow the rules already extant for crossbows, except they do a bit more damage. More modern firearms also have similarly efficient rules for their use. No problem, right?

Well, no, not exactly. Since they aren't part of the default game assumptions, they don't really interact well with things like special abilities or feats. If you use them as-is, there's no real reason to pick a firearm over a crossbow; if you start house ruling to make similar feats available for firearms, there's no reason to use anything but a firearm because their damage is just plain better.

Oddly, the solution to 5e's problem is the same as the solution to the old-school problem outlined above: just use the stats for crossbows, since they are already integrated into the game, and refluff the descriptive fiction as black powder firearms. A heavy crossbow could certainly be ye olde arquebus, a light crossbow could be ye olde musket, and the hand crossbow could be ye olde pistol. You don't have to invent rules about which class is proficient with which; just look to see which crossbows they can already use with proficiency and apply it to firearms as well. You don't have to come up with new feats; change the wording to Crossbow Expert and you're good to go.

Jodorowsky's Dune

Jodorowsky's Dune is an odd documentary; instead of chronicling the making of a feature film, it charts the strange life and stillborn death of Alejandro Jodorowsky's attempt to film Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel. 

The early portions of the film where interviewees speak on the formation of Jodorowsky's dream-team of collaborators and co-conspirators (a formidable list including Moebius, Chris Foss, H. R. Giger, Pink Floyd, Salvador Dali, Dan O'Bannon, Orson Welles, and David Carradine) plays out like Hannibal assembling a psychedelic and cinematic A-Team. Indeed, the process of finding the right people for the job feels like a trope straight out of Jodorowsky's work: he insists that he chose the people he wanted to work with based on their suitability to be "spiritual warriors" dedicated to the mind-expanding power of his vision for Dune. Even the stories Jodorowsky tells of saying the right metaphysical or philosophical thing at the exact right moment to hook his collaborators into working on the project has more than a bit of trickster mythology clinging to their edges.

It all comes crashing down when it turns out that no movie studio wants to put up the money for Jodorowsky to film his (let's go with) ambitious version of Herbert's novel. I am almost always on the side of artists in matters that pit creativity versus economics, but in this case Jodorowsky is a little disingenuous in his outrage with the way movies do or don't get made. Jodorowsky was proposing filming Dune as a fourteen-to-twenty hour film; it is something less than shocking that no major studio was willing to foot the bill for a project of that size that about a hundred people would watch. Of course, that is if the project didn't derail itself before completion, which frankly seems a likely outcome given the volatile personalities and overreaching intentions involved. 

Similarly, Nicholas Wendig Refn is completely full of shit when he claims that the reason Jodorowsky's Dune didn't get financed was because Hollywood was scared of the ideas the film might impart or inspire. Hollywood is afraid of only one thing: not making money.

You do feel for Jodorowsky when he talks about how he felt when he heard that David Lynch had successfully directed a version of Dune that was due for theatrical release. You can also easily excuse any spite on his part when he reports feeling relieved at discovering that Lynch's movie was a tremendous artistic blunder. Therein lies the silver lining; even if Jodorowsky had been able to bring his vision to the big screen, there is every chance that it would have been as titanic a misstep as Lynch's film. Jodorowsky didn't fail--he dodged a bullet.

The dissolution of a project, even of a dream project, is not always an artistic tragedy. That a Dune shot by Jodorowsky never materialized was a hidden blessing; although he didn't get to put his own personal stamp on Arrakis, he was able to later return to the ideas he had for the Dune film and craft them into a series of stunning comic books. The Incal, Metabarons, Technopriests, et al, are the inheritors of the inspirations Jodorowsky accumulated for Dune, but in execution that are better for not being fettered to a film adaptation of another artist's work. The comics are purer expressions because they are individualist expressions rather than adaptive ones. They still contain the strands of Jodorowsky's Dune-inspired mania, but they are works that reinterpret and reinvent with a freer hand and freer spirit. I certainly wouldn't trade them for another shoddy silver screen run at Dune.

Dirgecraft: Krevborna Edition

What did I listened to as I worked on Krevborna? These mixes will give you an idea. Click the links to open the mixtapes at 8tracks.

Red Acid Haze
Trackist: Blood Ceremony - Lorely † Hexvessel - Earth Over Us † Purson - Dead Dodo Down † Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Downtown † Earth - From Zodiacal Light † Sabbath Assembly - I, Satan † Jex Thoth - Into a Sleep

The Quiet of Arboreal Graves
Tracklist: Mike Reagan and Chris Velasco - Darksiders Theme † Glenn Danzig - Bridal Ceremony of the Lilitu † Salt and Sanctuary - Sacrifice † Abel Korzeniewoski - Transgression † Dark Souls - Aldritch, Devourer of Gods † Howard Shore - The Defiler † Dead Can Dance - I Am Stretched on Your Grave † Mark Korven - Witches’ Coven † Myrkur - Skogen Skulle Do

Orchestrated at the Edge
Tracklist: Peccatum - Murder † Haggard - Of a Might Divine † Finntroll - Ett Norrskendad † Porta Nigra - Fin de Siecle † Summoning - Nightshade Forests † Lacrimosa - Thunder and Lightning † Therion - Polichinelle † Skepticism - Pouring

Chancel by Night
Tracklist: Myrkur - Onde Born † Cradle of Filth - A Gothic Romance † Dimmu Borgir - The Night Masquerade † Therion - To Mega Therion † Theatres des Vampires - Lilith Mater Inferorum † Ancient Ceremony - Brides Ghostly Dance † Opera IX - The Sixth Seal † Moonspell - First Light

The Master and Margarita: Absurdity and Writing

The characters in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita live in an obviously absurd world. The extremity of that absurdity is such that instead of creating a rich tapestry of fantasy or magic realism, it instead renders the plot—such that it is—annoying to many readers. And yet, I don't think that annoyance is truly rooted in an utterly unrecognizable heft of absurdity permeating the plot, characters, and setting; rather, the absurdity in the novel is vexing because it echoes a fear we have about our own existences: our world is also absurd, and if it isn't as profoundly absurd, it is at least persistently absurd. There is an uncomfortable resonance there, which is why the narrative chafes.

Many of the characters in the novel attempt to make sense of the absurdity that surrounds them in a way that is recognizable to many of us: they attempt to write their way toward sense, order, and understanding of the world around them. Take Ivan, the poet, as an example:

'The poet’s attempts to compose a report on the terrible consultant had come to nothing. As soon as he received a pencil stub and some paper from the stout nurse, whose name was Praskovya Fyodorovna, he had rubbed his hands together in a businesslike fashion and hastily set to work at the bedside table. He had dashed off a smart beginning, “To the police. From Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, member of MASSOLIT. Report. Yesterday evening I arrived at Patriarch’s Ponds with the deceased Berlioz …”

And the poet immediately became confused, largely due to the word “deceased.” It made everything sound absurd from the start: how could he have arrived somewhere with the deceased? Dead men don’t walk! They really will think I’m a madman!

Such thoughts made him start revising. The second version came out as follows, “ …with Berlioz, later deceased …” That didn’t satisfy the author either. He had to write a third version, and that came out even worse than the other two, “… with Berlioz, who fell under a streetcar …” What was irksome here was the obscure composer who was Berlioz’s namesake; he felt compelled to add, “ …not the composer …”' (Chapter XI: Ivan is Split in Two).

Even those most comforting pastimes and passions of the intelligent and creative—writing, words, literature, art—fail to give sufficient structure or stability to a world seething with nonsense, surreality, coincidence, and chaos. Words might comfort us, but in the end they don't work; language becomes so slippery and imprecise that even Ivan's third draft of his account refuses to give a definite shape to his experience.

So it goes with all of us, but perhaps writers feel this failure more keenly. Bulgakov certainly does: the novel is brimming with writers and other creatives who turn to writing or storytelling as a bulwark against an uncertain world, only to have a chance for greater meaning slip away into the tumult of a world that cannot be tamed by words alone. Ivan feels this, as does the Master, as does Margarita, as does anyone connected to MASSOLIT, as does Pontius Pilate and Levi Matvei as they witness The Story of Stories unfolding. Does Bulgakov? I'm terrifyingly certain he did.

Grand Guignol Art, Cersei Lannister's Fashion, Dandy Cigarette Cards

Wonderfully lurid and and macabre posters from the Grand Guignol (Dangerous Minds)

Cersei Lannister's Fashion Evolution (by Freyia Lilian Porteous for Bustle)

Historical Dandies: British Cigarette Cards (by Karen Strike for Flashbak)

Medieval Bestiary, Which Playable Race Should You Pick?, Where to Start with Discworld

A Lavishly Illustrated Medieval Bestiary Goes Online (Claire Voon for Hyperallergic)

Volo's Guide to Monsters: Which Playable Race Should You Pick?

Infographic: Where to Start with Terry Prachett's Discworld Series (Lincoln Michel for Electric Lit)

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet

Ta-nehisi Coates's run on Black Panther feels like a historic moment in comics: it marks the first black superhero being written by one of the most prominent black voices in contemporary literature at a time when black bodies are explicitly a fulcrum of modern political contention. (Black bodies have always been a fulcrum of American politics, but America has rarely admitted to this fact.) It might be expected, then, that Coates's Black Panther series would speak to the precarious situation (both political and lived) of the black body within the fictional context of comic books. After all, the subtitle of Coates's series, A Nation Under Our Feet, echoes the title of Steven Hahn's account of Southern black political struggles from slavery to the black diaspora within America.

Coates's Black Panther is political, inasmuch as it speaks to how power is constructed, defined, and exercised. But this Black Panther series is as much a part of Coates's deconstructive project as his book Between the World and Me. One of the main points of Between the World and Me (aside from the precarity of the black body and the centrality of that vulnerability to America's history) is the necessity of critique. Between the World and Me is ostensibly a letter from Coates to his son, telling him that he needs to deeply question the narratives he's going to inherit about blackness and America throughout his life, but it's also a letter to every reader who picks up the book--and it tells us the same thing: don't except the validity or truth of the American Dream without really looking at it with open eyes.

Black Panther continues that deconstructive critique, but unlike Between the World and Me it isn't oriented specifically toward race in America. There are a few illustration choices in the series that recall America's current racial tensions. For example:

This alternate cover for the first issue shows the Black Panther surrounded by white policemen with guns at the ready--an understandable anxiety for the possessor of a black body in the current cultural moment of militarized police forces and "stand yoru ground" dogma--although such a scene never happens in the comic the cover adorns.

Similarly, this page shows the Black Panther going prone under what could be interpreted to be a bullet wound to the head. (It's not; it's the technological part of his costume activating.)

Instead of dealing with the myths of race and the society built upon them, the deconstructive thrust of the book is specifically applied to the superhero genre: in Coates's series, it may well be the case that the Black Panther is not the hero of his own book. On the surface, that sounds like madness; of course he's the hero of the book, it's named after him and he's in the foreground of the cover! That's how you know he's the hero, right?

As far as I can tell (and I admit that I am far from an expert on capes comics), a superhero needs four things to be defined as such: powers or abilities beyond the normal ken, a willingness to use those powers or abilities for the greater good, a weakness of some sort, and villains to fight against.

I want to talk about the first three as a group because they are the mostly tightly entwined in Coates's Black Panther. The Black Panther's abilities and his willingness to use them for good are both undermined by his major flaw. Unlike Superman and his vulnerability to Kryptonite, the Black Panther's flaw is not external; it is intimately interior--his flaw is his own internalized self-doubt. The Black Panther doubts everything essential for his own self-belief that he is the hero of the tale. He doubts his ability to protect his people and promote their welfare, he doubts that one man can make a difference and steer history and polity in the right direction, he doubts that he is a just ruler of his kingdom, he doubts his inheritance, he doubts the very shape of kingship because it seems at odds with the nation's will. He doubts that being a superhero is possible.

He has good cause for doubt himself because the villains that oppose him aren't necessarily wrong. In the handful of issues collected in A Nation Under Our Feet, we get introduced to "villains" that often seem as heroic as the title character, and are in fact differentiated from the Black Panther largely by their vastly different and incompatible political beliefs and worldviews. The two women who are renegade royal guards turned against they system they once upheld, for example, do more to protect the downtrodden of Wakanda, and are far more effective at doing so, than T'Challa is throughout the initial issues of the series. Their belief that no one man should have exclusive access to political authority must ring true for a number of readers--it echoes the vigilante mindset of adored heroes like Batman, while also recalling true democratic principles. These villains hardly seem villainous.

Tetu and Zenzi, the other group of "villains" that the Black Panther must contend with, also seem to linger in a liminal gray area that is hard to convincingly describe as villainy. As a shaman, Tetu is representative of African land itself, and its rejection of the traditional regime's various environmental and biopower transgressions; as the leader of the People, he represents popular uprising against traditions that no longer embody the human beings who must live as one with the land and each other. Zenzi is likewise cast as a potential liberator; her ability to bring the people's resentments and anger explosively to the surface is effectively a symbolic awakening of the political consciousness and radicalization of lingering dissatisfaction with their sovereign, and perhaps the idea of sovereigns as a whole. It isn't so easy to see these two characters as villains either; contrasted against the Black Panther's inclinations and actions, they might be kind of outsiders we love to see stand corruption and tyranny.

Without a clear hero and without clear villains, Black Panther is shades of gray all the way down. The intersections tear themselves apart, as crossroads always do. We have, of course, seen deconstructions of the superhero genre before. After Watchmen, we might even claim to have suffered a deluge of them. But few deconstructions of the capes-and-costumes genre have connected that deconstruction as closely to critiques of national relations of power, nor to the ways that the politics of nation are always already the politics of the individuals--from highest to lowest--from which the nation arises.

To the Devil a Daughter

Bad Books for Bad People is back with its fourth episode, in which we turn our critical eye toward Dennis Wheatley's To the Devil a Daughter.

Ultra-prolific British pulp author Dennis Wheatley is best known for his occult thrillers, which combined Wheatley's fascination with magic with his conservative politics. Kate and Jack tackle his 1953 offering To the Devil A Daughter, which involves a mystery author and her interior decorator son who get enmeshed in an occult conspiracy when they delve too deeply into the mysterious young lady who becomes their neighbor on the French Riviera.

This month's guest reader is Kristen Korvette, founder and editor of Slutist, whose study of (and firsthand experience with) witches make her an ideal fit to read from a stuffy, ultra-conservative book about sinister Satanists.

Why does possession by the devil turn our imperiled heroine into someone vastly more awesome? Will a mutual hatred of taxes bring the novel's heroes into an understanding with the villains? Are our hosts secretly Dennis Wheatley villains themselves? How is Stalin involved in this whole mess? Find out all this and more in this month's episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

Intro/Outro Music: "The Devil's Skin" by Gein and the Graverobbers

Find us at BadBooksBadPeople.com, on Twitter @badbooksbadppl, Instagram @badbooksbadpeople and on Facebook.

Boneshaker

A lot of steampunk settings run shallow, but that is not the case with the post-apocalypse steampunk Seattle described in Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. Priest’s re-imagined Seattle has been left desolate and dangerous by the "trial run" of Leviticus Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine–the "Boneshaker" in common parlance. The Boneshaker drilled under many buildings in the city (most notably the banks), which collapsed several structures. Worse yet, the drill released a toxic substance now known as Blight gas from deep within the earth; those who are exposed to too much Blight gas become rotters–that’s zombies, to you and me. In the aftermath of Blue’s experimental drill, Seattle was evacuated due to being overrun by rotters and Blight gas. Massive walls were erected to keep the gas and rotters contained (the gas is heavier than air), and the city was largely abandoned.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that the city is uninhabited. Desperate and mad hold-outs still carve out an existence within the city walls. Doornails (as in, "Dead as a...") have created their own fortified enclaves, Chinese immigrants man massive air pumps to bring fresh air in from above the city’s walls, and scrappers search the refuse and rubble for items worthy of salvage.

The city isn’t as inaccessible as is generally assumed, either. Sky pirates can tether their airships above the walls to transport goods and people in or out of Seattle. Similarly, the tunnels that make up the water runoff system can be navigated to provide entrance to and escape from the city.

There is good reason to enter and leave the city, especially if you’re a ne’er-do-well of the criminal sort. Chemists have formulated a way to distill Blight gas into an addictive drug called lemon sap, so dealers rely on opportunist entrepreneurs to harvest the Blight gas from within the city’s walls and on rogue scientists to render the gas into its profitable form.

Of course, any sort of expedition into the city will be dangerous. The Blight gas that clings to the streets requires that any travelers don filtration masks and cover as much skin as possible (the gas is highly corrosive). The hordes of ravening rotters make stealthy movement a must. Additionally, the people who still live within Seattle are highly factionalized; straying into territory controlled by a group you don’t belong to is a recipe for an early grave.

However, as hardscrabble as Seattle is, efforts have been made to make it a more survivable place. The various inhabitants of the city have worked hard to create sealed-off areas that offer a haven of fresh air. These safe-zones are accessible by retractable ladders, platforms, and catwalks. (Rotters can climb, but not without difficulty.) Some of these safe harbors even contain a stock of refreshments for the weary traveler.

Furthermore, the city’s residents have heavily-fortified their regions against rotter incursions and against attacks from each other. Because occupying the upper stories of extant buildings risks exposure to the Blight gas, Seattle's survivors have build down into the earth, carving out subterranean kingdoms supplied with semi-fresh air. 

Twisting tunnels and secret doors offer a veritable city-beneath-the-city to explore. And with the amount of experimental steam-tech left over from Leviticus Blue’s experiments, to say nothing of the new creations doled out by the sinister, masked Dr Minnericht, there is surely enough loot here to tempt an outsider into delving Seattle.

Now that's some good world-building.

Dirtbag Dragonlance

I admit that I loved the first three Dragonlance books in junior high; I had pneumonia for a month at the end of 6th grade and read the first trilogy and thought they were the best thing EVER. Then I read them again at the end of high school and wondered what was wrong with me back in the 6th grade. Now, they seem better than most game-related fiction, but thematically and stylistically the world of Krynn seems flat and more than a bit dull. As a game world, the setting, plot, and characters possess zero moral ambiguity (even though the dominant moral compass seems hopelessly out of whack).

Still, I think we can work with this.

Instead of a Nice Guy Place where everyone has flowing hippie hair, what if we spun this as Dirtbag Krynn, a land where trailerpark denizens do batt‚le against other inbred jerkwads over the fate of a meth-faced planet?

* * *

As long as we’re being honest, we can admit that Tanis is lame as hell. His love-triangle plot is lame, his mixed-heritage outsider plot played out with a minimum of real drama, and he looks like he belongs in Fleetwood Mac. What if Tanis were more like this Red-Headed Stranger?:

How much cooler would Tanis be if he was a weed-smokin’ country outlaw? So much cooler. I’m pre‚tty sure Shotgun Willie would have no qualms about bedding both Laurana and Kitiara; hell, he’d probably maneuver them into a three-way.

Kender are a problem. They're kleptomaniacs and somehow also annoyingly cutesy-poo. In keeping with the aesthetics of Dirtbag Dragonlance, they become a new race: Meth Heads. Think about it, they’d still steal shit and act all jittery-spazzy.

Goldmoon?

Want to see what they serve at the Inn of the Last Home?

Dragons are, of course, a big part of Dragonlance. But in Dirtbag Krynn "dragon" is just what they call one of these:

Yeah, they come in different colors and shoot all sorts of killing-you-loudly stuff out the front. Done deal.

Dragonlances? Another nickname. For hyper-powered shotguns:

The Towers of High Sorcery? More like the Towers of Skynyrd, AC/DC, and ZZ Top. The Test of High Sorcery involves chugging Tussin and confronting the demons of rock, maaaaaaaaaaaan.

Paladine

vs.

Takhisis

Draconians? Nah, nah, son. Juggalos:

Overture

With its first issue published in 2013, Sandman: Overture arrived many years after Neil Gaiman's original Sandman run concluded in 1996. Overture is positioned as a prequel to the justly celebrated Sandman saga; it aims to flesh-out the previously hinted at conflict that left Morpheus weakened and vulnerable to capture by the occultist Roderick Burgess in the first issue of The Sandman series.

As a physical object, the deluxe edition of Overture is a fairly lavish affair. The hardcover is protected by a nice slipcover, there are multiple pull-out spreads, and eye-popping color-saturated psychedelic-inspired art--although sometimes the art crosses over into the realm of the garish.

Overture's story involves Morpheus attempting to undue a problem that he helped to create--a running theme of Sandman in general. In a galaxy other than our own, Morpheus let a dream vortex develop into a destructive state that claimed countless lives. This first dereliction of duties is followed swiftly by another; after Morpheus finally cleans up the mess create by his reticence to kill the vortex, he neglects to destroy a star that has become infected with the vortex's calamitous intent. The chaotic residue left over from Morpheus's failure to deal with the vortex in its entirety spreads like a cancer through multiple worlds connected by the Dreaming, threatening to destroy the universe as a whole.

And thus, a hero's journey is called for. In the company of a cat-ish aspect of himself (or so he thinks) and an orphaned girl named Hope, Morpheus must finish what he left unfinished, a feat compromised by other stars who bar the Sandman from his goal, and a host of other complications that encompass both external resistance and his own internal grappling with the responsibilities of his position and purpose. The connection to the previous Sandman comics is well-made; this Morpheus is one who again grapples with duty, the importance of storytelling, the nature of dreams, etc.

Where we have seen Gaiman pattern his own mythopoeia after Greek tragedy and Shakespeare drama, we now see him again return to Classical appropriation--but in Overture this takes a Freudian turn. His most direct route to resolving the dilemna of the mad star stymied, Morpheus must return to both Father and Mother for aid that hardly feels like aid. This, in itself, gestures to the most under-theorized aspect of the Oedipal complex--not the need to best the father and possess the mother, but rather the need to reveal both father and mother as intrinsic and inescapable elements of the self. When Morpheus deals with his father's stoic briskness and fetish for obligation and his mother's morbid consumption and blank satiety, he's really addressing those sides of his own personality and weighing his flaws against his own merits. The Oedipal call was coming from inside the house all along because Mom and Dad were never home to begin with.

Overture's unveiling of a new epic tangent that the Sandman series had yet to plumb is compelling, but also partially a misstep. Part of the power of myth is in the gaps--the spaces between the stars grant us telemetry by which to chart a course. By filling in some of the gaps of The Sandman--providing Morpheus with parents, especially parents as cliched as Time and Night--we lose a little mystery. Similarly, Overture is too apt to explain itself in ways that myths never do. For example, we are shown that the cat accompanying Morpheus was Desire all along, even though this was something that a mildly-astute reader would have surmised for themselves without the need of a reveal. Guessing at how a magic trick is performed is far more satisfying than getting confirmation. Overture is more successful when it lets the reader put the pieces together, as it does by not stating that his brief time with the orphaned Hope later inspired the finishing blow in Morpheus's battle in Hell.

Not everything can be Greco-Freudian, of course. In the end game, Morpheus must go biblical or go home. At Desire's prodding, he builds an ark and fills it with dreamers who can dream reality back into existence after the now-unavoidable catastrophic flood. And then we're back where we started, quivering within a summoning circle in the basement of an English manor house.

* * *

Many thanks to Scott Martin, who bought me a copy of Overture purely because he wanted me to talk about it. That's both generosity defined and an uncommon willingness to hear me natter. This one's for you, Scott.

The Sporting Life of the Mind Flayers

Maybe in this campaign setting mind flayers won’t have the Squidface-from-Star-Wars-meets-low-grade-Cthulhu vibe we’re used to.

Rather, mind flayers will be a race of weird sentient squids that mind blast their enemies, climb atop their skulls while they’re stunned, bore into their craniums and start driving their victims around like a fleshy car.

When they’re done with a particular "vehicle" they eat his or her brain and find a new ride. These mind flayers are the Grand Theft Auto players of the Far Realm.

Perhaps mind flayers even have a sort of decadent NASCAR vibe where they actively hunt people who seem like they would be particularly fast...all because there is a grand footrace in which the mind flayers race their host bodies on a track lit by fungoid light deep within the Underdark.

Dances of the Dead, Heavy Metal Castlevania, The Voyeur's Hotel

Dances of the dead: the victims’ ball, Gothic fashion and entertainment of late 18th century France (by Fanny Lacote for the University of Sterling, The Gothic Imagination)

Slain Looks Like Heavy Metal Castlevania (by Nathan Grayson for Kotaku)

The Voyeur's Hotel (Gay Talese for The New Yorker)

Mr. Mancible Raunch, Etterchap

Mr. Mancible Raunch is an arachnoid, but he prefers to be referred to as an etterchap. Raunchy, as he is known to his friends, has an absolute mania for clothes and accouterments of the latest style. He’s also a notorious ladies man; despite his unusually appearance, he has a charming manner and a number of women of various species pine after his spidery affections.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that Raunch is simply an empty-headed fop. He currently serves as the Chief Operative of the Worthing & Moncrieff Detective Agency, an organization that functions much like a city-wide arm of "personal law enforcement" in Scarabae. The Worthing & Moncrieff Detective Agency employs a number of spies, investigators, guards, infiltrators, and (some say) strike-breakers. In his role within the company, Mancible Raunch assigns appropriate agents to tasks that suit their skills. As such, Raunch is an important man for crypt kickers to be on friendly terms with, as he has been known to employ hard-luck ne’er-do-wells as "independent contractors" for the Agency.

Protective Detournement in Fantasy Fiction: Reification and the Anxiety of Influence

Sword & Hood: the current face
 of fantasy reification

Reification only occurs in regards to literary genres when the rubber hits the road in marketing. Genres become stable, recognizable things only when a literary form is transformed into a commodity. The "Fantasy and Science Fiction" section at Barnes & Noble only exists because books that fall into the category of "Fantasy and Science Fiction" have proven themselves to be profitable when marketed according to that rubric. It is the libidinal economy of the publishing market that dictates the categorization of literature; often, this is a four-way complicity between writers who fit their imagination into pre-established modes, publishers looking to profit from marketable categorization, literary critics who prop up the internal mechanics of categorization, and readers who are willing to put up with artificial boundaries structuring their experience of literature.

The effect of literary reification is (at least) two-fold: the candy-coating shell only goes on the chocolate when its becomes apparent that the chocolate is worth money; the shell is there because it is the part you can put a logo on.

Additionally, once the other hopeful authors smell blood in the water (or milk in the chocolate), they know that if they want to swim with the big fish they're going to need to make their competing products fit the already-in-place shape provided by reification. Successful examples of "genre writing" begets imitators and derivatives. When Twilight was the unstoppable juggernaut of the publishing world, suddenly all these other books with Twilight-esque covers and content appeared on the shelves too. Even Pride & Prejudice started to look like it had some sparkle to it:

Literary reification, then, creates walls. But what of innovation within genre, those works that attempt to tear down walls and assert the primacy of different literary modalities? What work do they do and how do they do it?

We might look at "sword & sorcery" as a paradigmatic reaction against, or innovation away from, the Tolkienian strain of "high" fantasy that preceded it and that had necessarily become a reified form of fantasy fiction. Indeed, the phrase "sword & sorcery" was concocted to define how the fiction of Robert E. Howard was different from that of his predecessors. An exchange of ideas between Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber in the pages of various fanzines led to Leiber asserting, "I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too!" (Amra, July 1961).

Of course, with time and the acceptance of sword & sorcery as a term of definitional power, it too became a literary reification with expected boundaries and internal literary conventions. Walls were built anew from the rubble left by the vandals at Tolkien's gates. Due to that reification, we now generally know what to expect from a novel marketed as belonging to the realm of swords & sorcery: barbarians with mighty thews, decadent civilizations vs. the vigor of the natural savage, personal danger instead of imperiled worlds, and protagonists dispossessed of moral certitude.

In the terms used by Deleuze & Guattari, Howard's rebellion against Tolkien-esque fantasy is the matter of mapping versus tracing. Tolkien's world is fully traced; Middle-earth is a closed system of unitary distinctions between signifier and signified, between ring and power. Howard's world, in contrast, is a mapping of the ecstatic elaboration of Conan as a metaphor that changes as he becomes reaver, conqueror, king, et al.

But if we see a shade of rebellion in the way that Howard's sword & sorcery tales do not conform to the literary conventions of high fantasy, there is iconoclastic dissension within the ranks of swords & sorcery as well. Michael Moorcock's Elric, for example, seems crafted as the antithesis of Howard's Conan: Conan is a barbarian, Elric is the ruler of an effete and decadent empire; Conan is strong and physical, Elric is weak and must rely on drugs and magic to live; Conan is a warrior, Elric is a learned sorcerer better suited to the book than the sword; Conan's sorrow is the boredom of peace, Elric's melancholy is that his peace will always be interrupted by the cruel machinations of fate.

We could read Moorcock's Elric series as a detournement of Howard's sword & sorcery tales, and especially as a detournement of the economics of the fantasy fiction marketplace. Nevertheless, Moorcock's intentions with Elric might have less to do with moving away from Howard's mode of fantasy adventure and more to do with clearing away the detritus that accumulated around Howard's vision; Elric isn't the antithesis of Conan, he is the antithesis of the economic reiteration of Conan across thousands of characters who are Conan in all but name. Elric doesn't battle with Conan in the economic arena, he battles against imitation, the watering-down of the imaginative power of fantasy by genre-based marketing, and especially the copycat authors who would steal the gift of fire from Howard.

(Note that Karl Edward Wagner further detourned sword & sorcery fiction not by reacting against Conan and Elric, but instead by crossing the streams and combining them as an admixture in his character Kane.)

This "protective detournement" is a peculiar form of the anxiety of influence. Its goal isn't to silence the previous poet's voice or to bury one's artistic father figure, but rather to save the progenitor from being overwritten and diminished by those who are content to speak falsely in the poet's voice or to prop him or her up as an effigy. 

By using the phrases of their influences to speak new sentences, those who practice protective detournement seek to keep the voice of their inspiration vital. The agon is not to compete against the father, but rather to strive against the sons and daughters who would wear his mantle as their own without having earned it.

This phenomenon is observable in fantasy fiction outside the confines of sword & sorcery as well. Although on the surface it may appear that George R. R. Martin's project is to revise the optimistic thrust of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings cycle to account for the corruption in mankind's heart, the real aim is to keep Tolkien's form of storytelling current and accessible, modern and flexible. 

And yet, protective detournement itself is prone to the reification always already present in genre-creating, genre-bending, and genre-breaking--especially where economic success looms on the horizon. Martin may change the game from rings to thrones, but his detournement has already become another category of imitation and crass marketing; witness the rise and fecundity of the "gritty fantasy epic" that currently clogs the marketplace for fantasy fiction. And so the agon continues: swords against darkness and deviltry, certainly, but also against the reification of the imagination too.

Storm of Wings

A Storm of Wings is an incredibly frustrating book because the ways in which the author tries too hard and doesn't try hard enough collude against the story. M. John Harrison tries far too hard to convince the reader that the setting of his novel is dream-like, hallucinatory, and weird. That's a fine world-building goal in itself, but when one of your primary ways of achieving a phantasmagorical setting is to describe things over and over with the words “indescribable” and “alien,” you're actively avoiding engaging with language to show the reader how strange your fictive world is—you're telling the reader how odd it is, which (as a writing technique) has very little impact on the reader's aesthetic response.

Harrison's other technique for expressing the strangeness of his setting is similarly flawed; he tends to jam incongruous words together in a way meant to be surprising, misdirecting, and novel, but these lexicographic pile-ups often over-reach and come off as lazy shorthand that would be better better replaced by concrete description.  Also, Harrison is overly-pleased that certain words live in his vocabulary; “gamboge” and “hieratic” occur frequently within the text as pale markers of the author's self-assumed cleverness. The rarity of oft-unused words can't carry descriptive weight alone.

The saddest victim of Harrison's excesses and deficiencies is the pace of the novel's plot. Underneath all the verbiage and attempts at disorienting imagery lies a simple narrative core: the world is being invaded; unlikely heroes must assemble; the nature of the invaders needs to be uncovered; the invaders need to be stop and the world thus saved. This is an archetypal, but still enjoyable, narrative structure. But it seems that Harrison is embarrassed by how typical a story he is telling because he takes every opportunity to avoid telling it. 

Alternately, one may suppose that he's embarrassed at writing in the fantasy genre.

My copy of the book is about one-hundred and forty pages long; the first ninety pages are spent gathering the characters to their quest and illustrating their disaffection and alienation by the above mentioned means. The actual plot only really kicks in during the last forty pages of the book, and proceeds almost perfunctorily as a chore that has been put off but now must finally be done.

When the plot does lurch forward, it's clumsy on its feet. Despite spouting some of the worst attempts at nonsensical “alien” dialog ever committed to paper, the ghost of a spacefarer suddenly becomes lucid and drops a huge chunk of plot revelation because the author has been neglecting to seed bits of actual story throughout the narrative. Our ghost here is constantly farting and belching; this important because...? Ah yes, bodily functions signal weirdness or some such.

The tragedy of Storm of Wings is that Harrison is clearly capable of so much more. The Pastel City managed to tell a story directly while still presenting a unique world and making a case for the author's aesthetic taste. Although still excessive, though to a lesser extent, In Viriconium has a sort of lunatic charm. A Storm of Wings itself is littered with sparkling lines that are beautiful, true, and deserving of a better novel to bejewel. “We value our suffering. It is intrinsic, purgative, and it enables us to perceive the universe directly,” Harrison writes powerfully. Would that the rest of the book was built from this sense of direct perception, and not reliant on gimmicks of language and a dialectic of pretense and indolence.